I have the best husband in the whole world!  I got my birthday present a month early and I've been wanting this thing for a couple of years.

That's right, it's a new pressure cooker!  It is so awesome - it's huge.  It has six locking hinges and NO gasket.  My old pressure cooker had a gasket that had to be cleaned and oiled - but this one is just metal on metal.

Here's a picture of the old and the new cookers next to each other.  I have gotten a lot of miles out the old one and I'll keep it forever, but look at my new baby!  I have pressure canned pot roast, hamburger, chicken, soup, pinto beans, and black beans.  There's a whole list of things I'm going to get around to - when I get time.
I have a water bath canner for making jelly.  That doesn't require a pressure cooker.

Just to give you an idea of the size of this thing, you can stack two layers of quart jars - six or seven on each layer.  I am so excited to take it on a test drive.  
Every time I mention "pressure cooker" in front of my mother, I hear the story about how my grandmother was using a pressure cooker back in the day and the top blew off and she was burned really bad.  And every time I remind her that pressure cookers have come a long way in the past 50 years and if you use them correctly, they're not going to blow up on you.  The new pressure cookers have a temperature gauge and steam release valves.  If you've never used one, I would have someone show you the process before I cranked one up.  Better safe than sorry.  You can even find instructional videos on YouTube.

Yesterday was the big day!  Ok, the first of a few big days.  The apple trees were ready for pickin' and we got started.  All I had was my laundry basket, so we filled it up and headed for the kitchen.  My dad has a juicer and I started juicing with his juicer and putting the apple juice in the refrigerator.  That was taking FOREVER, so I got my juicer and enlisted Mike's help.  We had both going at the same time.  I would wash and chop and he would shove the pieces in the juicer.  The problem with juicers??  You have to wash them and clean out the pulp every 5 minutes.  

 We made regular apple jelly and a smaller batch of sugar free.  Here's a picture of the regular jelly we made from the laundry basket of apples.  It was awesome!  There was some left over that didn't fit into the jars and I put it in a bowl in the fridge.  It came out at breakfast this morning.  My problem with the sugar-free apple jelly is it doesn't set well.  It's really soft - more like syrup.  I do not understand!  I guess I need to research what's up with the sugar free pectin.

This morning was a little foggy so I took this picture of the back pasture for you.  We sat outside at daybreak drinking hot tea and enjoying the sounds of nature.

This afternoon we picked another basket of apples to take back home with us.  Mike and I'll be chopping and juicing all week after work.  

There's at least 2 more baskets of apples still on the trees. My neice Amber was at the house while I was chopping up the first load and she said "but these apples aren't pretty!".  And it made me think how we have become so used to the perfect produce we see in the grocery stores.  Apples grown on regular trees are NOT pretty!  The ones you get in the grocery store have been chemically sprayed during every phase of their development and ensure you get "pretty" fruit.  If you just let nature take it's course, you'll have apples that are misshappen (maybe the blossom didn't form perfectly) and the apples may have spots (from water, rain wind damage and whatever else.)  It's OK!  Hmmmm, eating an apple with no chemical spray on it - Hmmm, eating apple jelly from apples with no chemical spray on them.  

Do you remember my pig pen?   This is a before picture - one of the ones I posted a couple of weeks ago.  You couldn't even walk through it.

Well, Mike and I spent an afternoon cleaning house.  Take a look at it now.  Yes, I know, that looks like it's about to fall apart.  It is.  We plan on reinforcing the walls and keeping what will keep standing.  It's pretty sad when you pull on a vine and it breaks a board in half........

Here's Mike almost at the end of the cleaning spree.  There's another pen on the other side of the fence in front of him.  That will be the next project!

We found a critter hole about 10 inches across and it went down into the ground.  I want my gun on me when that thing comes out of the ground.  

And take a look at this spider.  This web made a funnel and went straight down into an 8x8 pole.  The spider was sitting right at the entrance watching us - he had to be about 2 inches across.  He was probably catching small birds in that web.  I am so glad he didn't jump out or anything, I would have had a heart attack right there.  I hate bugs - not much of a country girl, huh?

On the next trip, we'll have a great bonfire with all of the brush and trees we pulled out of the pen.  Maybe I'll burn that spider - don't send me any nasty notes about killing spiders - I know some of them are good for the environment.  I'll find an app for my phone that can identify spiders and IF ITS A BAD ONE - he's mine.  Spider-snap?  I'm going to have to research which little pigs are going to live in my awesome pig pen!

I promised pictures of the apple trees.  Here you go:

There are two trees, a Dorsett and an Anna.  Supposedly, apple trees need to be planted in two to be happy.  That must be true, because these are the two happiest trees I've ever seen!

These trees are huge!  There's even enough apples for the deer to snack on, enough for some to just fall off the tree on their own, and enough left over to make jelly. Lots and lots of jelly.  They both need to be pruned, but you'd need a bucket truck to get up there.  I guess I'm going to have to find an arborist to come out and take a look. 

Right now, it's just so exciting! Waiting for them to get ripe, so we can start juicing and making jelly.  But I can tell you, after a couple of weekends of non stop kitchen activity, I can't stand the sight of an apple.  But that's still a couple of weeks away - right now, I'm still excited!                   

I was reading a chicken magazine last week - that's right, they actually publish a magazine all about chickens.  And not just one, there are several.  I'm not sure exactly what that says about me, but some of their articles are really interesting!    Did you know there's a book called "The Chicken Whisperer"?  It's on my wish list.  Anybody that gets close enough to whisper in a chicken's ear is OK in my book.  So, that made me think - exactly where are chicken ears?  I looked it up, just for you.  A chicken has ears on the side of it's head covered by feathers.  However, you can see it's earlobes - and the color of the ear lobes will tell you what color the eggs are going to be.  White, brown, etc.  Cool, huh?


Anyway, this magazine had an article about baking eggs instead of boiling them - and you get the same results.  Well, I had to check that out.  I decided to test 4 eggs and put them into a mini-muffin pan.  Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and set the timer for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, take the eggs from the oven and put into a bowl of ice water for 15 minutes.  The eggs will have tiny brown spots on them when you take the pan from the oven.  It's OK, it was in the chicken article too!  It's moisture coming through the shell.  The spots will dissolve in the bowl of water.

After 15 minutes in cold water, the eggs will be easy to peel.  They will have brown spots where the eggs leaned up against the pan, but it doesn't affect the taste.  I caught Mike chopping them up and grabbed a picture before they were all gone.

I could never seem to boil an egg correctly - the insides were never the same.  Either still mushy or cooked too much.  Have you ever boiled an egg and gotten a green ring around the yolk?  That is ferrous sulfide.  Eggs cooked at too high a temperature get the green ring.  The iron (ferrous) in the yolk reacts with the sulfur in the egg white.  Taste the same, but really looks strange.

It's already May.  Where has the year gone?  I checked out the apple, pear and fig trees at my Mom and Dad's this weekend and they are loaded!  I think June and July are going to be busy, busy, busy in the kitchen making jelly.  My Dad and I spend several weekends transforming bushels of fruit into jelly.  Since I left my camera at Amy's house this afternoon, there won't be any pictures today of the big fruit trees, but I can show you what Mike and I have put in on our farm.

Here one of our fig trees - and it's covered already.  We just planted them this year and I think we got a couple of keepers!  We also planted muscadine vines.  We planted 16 4x4 poles ten feet apart with a smooth 9 gauge wire stretching across the top of the poles from one end to the other.  Then planted a muscadine on every other pole.  The vines are growing straight up and when they get to the wire, we'll train them to go in both directions down the wire.  Does that make sense or did I totally confuse you?

Anyway, to make it easier to water the vines, we put in a drip line that provides one gallon to each plant every hour.  We purchased the supplies at Home Depot.  We have the solid drip line that connects to the water hose from the faucet and a drip head inserted at each vine which  you can see in the picture below.  It's like a tiny sprinkler at the base of the vine which makes it very efficient.  That way, no water is wasted anywhere else.  

If you've ever dragged a water hose across 250 feet trying to water,  you know what a pain that is!  Now, we just turn on the water faucet and sit back in the shade.

Have you noticed how EVERYBODY is serving sweet potatoes these days?   You can get sweet potato fries almost everywhere, sweet potato tots at Sonic, a sweet potato side at Wendy's, and if you've ever had the loaded sweet potato from Texas Road  House - then you've tasted a slice of heaven!  So, Mike and I went to the grocery store looking for sweet potato chips, right?  You'd think they would be sitting there right next to the other chips......but NO.  Can't find them anywhere. We circled back to the produce department, picked up a sweet potato and took it home.  It was just perfect. It was washed, peeled, and sliced thin on the mandolin.  We put the slices in a bowl and added a half teaspoon of olive oil and some kosher salt.  Then the slices were put into the dehydrator.

I turned it to about 135 degrees and left them for 24 hours.  When we came in from work yesterday, I unplugged the dehydrator and took the lid off to let the slices cool.  Then I went to change clothes and got busy doing something, I can't remember what.  Anyway, when I came back into the kitchen, this was what I found....

He had eaten all three trays!  What is up with that?  I guess they were pretty good.  I'm going to try it again, but I think they needed to be sliced a little thinner.  Which means I'm going to have to buy a new mandolin and not use that cheap one I have with one setting.  Sweet potatoes - one of life's little treasures.  Now if I just had a sweet potato pie.....

I have this garden out in the yard.  It's a 16 x 16 plot that's fenced in to keep the deer from totally destroying everything in it.  We spend hours - days -  every spring getting everything tilled, planted, weeded, fertilized, you name it.  Then there was this drought last year, and a heat wave, and I got a total of zip out of that garden.  So this year, I dug it out and planted an herb garden.  Oh yeah, much easier - it's very low maintenance.  We have regular Basil, Thai Basil, Cilantro, Parsley, Thyme, Oregano, Sage, Dill, Stevia, Rosemary and Mint.  Now if you can't cook with that, you need to stay out of the kitchen!  

You can get a lot of herbs out of one plant.  Take cuttings every couple of weeks to keep the plant pruned and it will become a bushier (is that a word?) healthy plant.  That brings me back to my best friend  - the dehydrator.  Wash your cuttings very well to remove all dirt and pat them dry.  

Place your herbs in the dehydrator trays, turn in on the low setting, 95 degrees, and go to bed. 

The next morning, your herbs are dehydrated.   If they're not absolutely dry, turn the dehydrator back on for a couple of hours.  Place each herb in a labeled jar and use when you need them.  Just a hint to help you out:  when you open the dehydrator in the morning, all the herbs look the same - all dry and shriveled up.  Until you learn what they look like all dried and crispy, put some sort of label on the trays.  Or, you could just take a bite from each one - but keep a glass of water handy!  You'll get enough herbs to last you all year.

I've read that you just put the herbs in the food processor, turn it on, and it chops the herbs perfectly.  I tried that in my little food processor and the herbs just spun in a circle and nothing got chopped.  I haven't tried it in my big food processor - because it just ticked me off that the little one didn't work.  Oh well, maybe I'll just buy one of those mortar and pestle things and crush them.  It'll be like therapy.

So, does this look like a pig pen to you?  It started out as a cattle pen about 40 years ago.  Use your imagination - it could happen!

Can you see that huge tree growing up through the slats?  Well, there's at least 3 that I can see from this picture and tons of brush.  Can you imagine what your yard would look like if you didn't mow it for 40 years?  That's right.  It's about 20 feet long and 20 feet wide.  There's a chute that starts on the front right, then opens up into the rest of the pen.  OK, so there's a little bit LOT of repair work to be done, but at least 2 sides are made from the heavy metal stock panels.  (whatever they're called).  And the best part?  It's already 90 degrees outside and it's only May.  So, that means I'll be clearing brush and cutting trees in June, July, and August!  It will only be 100 degrees!  Awesome!  No, I couldn't do it during the winter.  Because it's deer season from November to January.  You can't be out in the back pasture and scare the deer away!  Oh my gosh, what were you thinking??

We ran to the farm this weekend to mow the pasture.  The hay/weeds/vines were about fourteen inches tall.  Last weekend I was out in the back pasture and lost Frankie in the weeds (that would be the four pound dog).   He was successfully retrieved but covered in some kind of grass burr.  It's like a seed covered in velcro that sticks to your pants, your hair, your sleeves.....your dog.  Took all week to pick the burrs out of his hair and guess what?  He's covered again.  But he had such a good time!  He really thinks he's an outdoor dog.  This weekend, Mike took the big tractor out to the back pasture and I took the riding mower to the front couple of acres.  I'm hot, tired, covered in dirt and just plain icky.

I know what you're thinking.  It's not Halloween - so why do you look like that??  Well, get over it - the rubber boots keep the ants and bugs from crawling up my pants legs.  The long sleeve shirt prevents a "farmers tan" and the hat?  Well, that belongs to Mike, I just borrowed it!  And, there's Frankie in my lap.  He won't let me mow without him.  
By the way, I'm sitting in front of my cousin's house who owns the property next door.  That house belonged to my great-grandparents.  It was built in the early 40's from used wood they found because it was after WWII, and new wood couldn't be found.  They were in their sixties and this was the first house they ever owned.  My cousin and her husband are doing a great job getting it back in shape!

Meet my new best friend.  A dehydrator with a plastic fruit-roll up tray!

 Let’s experiment with a few things.  Do you remember during hurricane Ike, when the grocery stores were empty?  And you couldn’t get bread, meat, milk, eggs, or WATER?  Well, I can’t help you with the water, but let’s take a look at eggs.  I saw in a catalog where you could buy dried eggs in a can to store in case of emergencies – but I was too cheap to spend that much money.  But, during Easter, Kroger had eggs on sale for 88 cents a dozen – so I bought 4 dozen to experiment with.

1) After dinner, scramble 6 eggs in a bowl and 2) pour into the fruit roll-up tray of the dehydrator.  Set the temp setting on 145 degrees and go to bed.  3)  the next morning your tray will look like a sheet of corn flakes  4)  put the dried eggs in the blender to make a powder and 5) place in a glass jar with a tight fitting lid.

I know what you’re saying….”that’s just nasty.”  But hold on, let’s put it to a taste test!  I took a blueberry muffin mix and divided it into 3 parts - one third for the real egg, one third for the dehydrated egg and just because I wonder what people really put in muffin mixes, I decided to use one third with NO eggs.   For one egg, take a rounded tablespoon of dried egg power and add 3 tablespoons of water.   Beat with a fork and let sit for 10 minutes.  Beat again.  Mix all bowls of your muffin mix according to directions.  Place each batch into different colored muffin papers to distinguish them apart.

Here are the results.  

OK, let’s be honest.  On a scale of 1 to 10, the real egg is a 10, but the dried egg is an 8.  We don't even need to talk about the no egg muffins on the right - they were truly disgusting.  The real egg muffins browned better and looked prettier, but the taste was really close.  If you don’t have any eggs in the house during an emergency situation – you can still make hot, fluffy, blueberry muffins.  (my experiment assumes you keep muffin mix stored in your pantry – I’m just saying).  Next time, we’ll test scrambled dehydrated eggs!  Who’s coming over for dinner??

May 3, 2012

Here we go!  Mike and I wanted to start a blog to share with our family and friends the trials and successes of getting our goat farm established and our efforts to become self sustaining.  So, you will get to see us planting, building, canning the fruit from our property, putting up fences and all the other stuff.  This last weekend we drove up to water our muscodine vines and fruit trees.  And guess what?  It's dewberry season!  We walked the fields, crawled under trees, braved the thorns and got enough berries to make jelly. I used my potato masher to crush the berries, then drained it overnight through cheesecloth.  The next day I made 12 pints of dewberry jelly.  That was some good stuff!

This is my first attempt at a blog.