Hay in the Barn

Right now I am enjoying the feeling of security that few things in life can bring.  The one that has brought this contentment and safety to me at the moment, is having hay in the barn.

My second cut is finally done.  Late again this year, and wondrously, thankfully, yielding almost twice as much as last September's second cut. It is beautiful hay.

September hay is a gamble.  Nights are cool.  Mornings are foggy and wet.  Rain comes and sits for a while, usually in relation to whatever tropical storm or hurricane is hitting the Atlantic coast.  You can cut hay, sure, but getting it to dry in a timely fashion is another story.

We got lucky.  Hay was cut on Sunday, and despite nights in the 30's with frost (every one of 'em) and foggy mornings (every one of 'em), the blue skies held and temperatures climbed near 70 during the daytime. My hay was dry enough to bale on Wednesday afternoon.

Now it is in the barn, 147 bales (or, not quite 30 bales per acre, a far cry from the guaranteed 100 per acre I get year after year for 1st cutting, yet much better than last year's droughty second cutting hay which only yielded 15 bales an acre).

147 lovely, soft, delicious smelling bales.  A year's supply of hay for Old Man, who at 29 years old doesn't eat the coarser textured first cutting so well any more.

Hay in the barn.  Security.  Contentment.  Happiness.

the barn

the loft

inside the loft

Apparently one of our cats feels secure with all this hay too.  Because when I went to take pictures of the hay this morning, I found these nestled in the chaff:

Cooking. . . Because I Want To

I like to cook.  No, really, I do like to cook.  That fondness for spending hours in the kitchen has, through the years, gotten me varied comments from admiration, to amazement, to downright aggression.  There have actually been some people who act like I should not be happy toiling for my family's food.  After all, women are liberated these days.  Grocery stores full of heat-and-eat meals abound.  Not to mention the number of restaurants and fast food establishments there to take the burden off of me.  Just pull in, order whatever my heart desires, wait two minutes, and have food handed to me, hot and ready to eat.

Except for one major thing.  My heart desires good food.  Not just good tasting, but actual honest-to-goodness good-for-you food.  My system seems to be pretty sensitive to intrusive ingredients hiding in most of the conventional fare calling itself 'food' these days.  Artificial sweeteners kick off headaches and even migraines, depending on which sweetener it is.  Certain oils give me immediate gastric distress (usually the ones you look on the ingredients list and say "What the heck is that?!?  Whatever happened to corn oil?"  Other things are more sneaky, waiting a while after ingestion to make me feel not up to par.  And let's not even mention my eczema, which hasn't hardly bothered me at all since I went to scratch cooking and organic gardening.  'Nuff said.

So I don't want to be liberated from my kitchen.  I don't want to have 'more important things' to do.  I want to cook.

Unfortunately I have found that somehow, as this year has gone by, I have been separated from my kitchen more and more often.  Oh, I do spend eight to ten hours a week in it creating all my farmers market baked goods, but I have not spent much time daily creating good food for my family's meals.

I don't do boxed stuff, no matter how time crunched.  Frozen and microwaved are not allowed here.  (Heck, I don't consider the microwave a real way to prepare food, as I strongly suspect the food isn't as nutritious once it leaves the microwave as it was when it went in.)  For me, time crunched means one of my quickie "30 minutes to cook" menu items.

Which are all fine and dandy once in a while.  But when quickie fixes become five days a week, week after week, month after month, well, that is not fine and dandy with me.  I don't like it.  I feel stressed.  I feel like something has been taken from me--something tasty, as well as something I have a sense of joy in the creating.

Today, after fulfilling my work-away-from-home duties at the horse farm at one p.m., I decided I was going to cook.  Cook because I want to.  And boy, have I cooked!  A batch of granola, the first I've made to eat myself instead of sell at the market, since June began.  Two loaves of bread, because it's time to bake my weekly bread for the family.  Two loaves of french bread also, because I want some garlic bread with the dinner I have planned for tonight.  (One loaf will be for with dinner today, the second will go in the freezer for accompanying a future lasagna.)

Not started yet, but soon to begin, spaghetti for dinner.  With homemade sauce.  Using tomatoes, peppers, onions, basil and oregano from the garden.  Sauce that takes quite a bit longer to make than the few minutes of heating sauce from a jar requires.  Sauce that will be not just tastier, not just free of suspicious sounding ingredients, but sauce that will bring contentment and the satisfaction of doing what I want to do.  Cooking because I want to.

The Neighborhood "Watch"

So, it's mid September, heading into late September.  In my neck of the woods (pun intended--you'll get it in a minute), that means every guy and a lot of the girls you meet asks pretty much the same question:

"How's the deer out by you?"

Or, the variation:

"Seeing any horns?"

Now, we're well aware that whitetail deer have antlers, not horns.  But 'horns' is the local colloquial  for bucks.  So, the question isn't really about horns (OK, antlers) themselves, but about the number of bucks in the area.

I confess to having this conversation myself, just last week, when the blacksmith came to trim the horses' feet.  He hunts.  I hunt.  We often talk about deer while tending to the horses' regularly scheduled pedicures.  He lives in the neighborhood--about three miles away, but out here, that's still the neighborhood.  There might be twenty houses in that three miles, but most likely not.  Mostly fields.  And woods.  And deer.

He hadn't at that point, seen any 'horns'.  Just does and fawns.  I had just recently started to see small bucks showing up in my field and the field north of me. DH had also just hung the game cam back out in the woods, and we hadn't yet retrieved the SD card to see what was moving out there.

This week, however, is a different story.  The big guys have appeared.  Now DH and I are seeing, almost nightly, numerous bucks.  One night we counted six in the north field.  A couple sets of little guys (fork horns and six points) sparring.  Then we spotted some more massive bucks standing closer to the woods, keeping an eye on things.

It's almost hunting season.  The neighborhood watch is in full force. We're taking pictures for evidence.  And compiling our own Most Wanted list.  :0)

Their Time Has Come

The broilers, that is.  I had actually been planning to butcher them over Labor Day weekend, but ended up doing a marathon tomato canning session instead.  Meanwhile, the broilers kept eating, and growing, and pooping, and I kept hauling them water and feed and moving their pen daily to fresh grazing.

Until today.  This morning I decided that I was going to bite the bullet and just get those darn birds killed.

Why such an attitude?  Well, because I had decided last year that if I raised more meat chickens, I was going to do the butchering myself instead of taking them to the local processor.

Not that it wasn't handy to take them in, it was.  Not that the processor didn't do a good job, they had.  It was just that it was so darn expensive:  $3 per bird to kill, gut, and shrink wrap.  And if you didn't want your birds whole, it was $1 per "cut": $1 to cut in half, plus an additional dollar to cut into quarters, plus an additional dollar to cut into parts. . .

I think you can see how this could get kind of pricey if you didn't want all your birds back as roasters.  Which DH did not.  After 24 whole birds from the last batch we had raised and paid to have processed, DH said he liked it better when we had butchered them ourselves and then packaged into the cuts we wanted.  Such as bags of chicken wings (handy for Super Bowl time!!), packages of leg quarters, packages of boneless skinless breasts, packages of whole chickens cut into frying or barbecue pieces. . .

So, going into my broiler chicken endeavor this year I knew who would be doing the processing.  Me.  Hopefully with some additional help, but most likely not.  DH hates butchering chickens.  And with his long work days bringing home the figurative bacon, I can't really expect him to cheerfully assist in chicken termination.  Both of our daughters are in school full time, with homework to do after class, DD1 works a 15-hour work week on top of college classes, and DD2 is knee-deep in football cheer season.  Not to mention their reluctance to help with eviscerating fowl.

So, me it was.

It was with this knowledge that I faced the task in front of me this morning.  Thankfully not twenty-four chickens, but only a dozen.  It seems that the minimum number of birds for live shipping from the hatcheries has gone down this year.  So I got a much smaller number of broilers.

Yet, a dozen chickens is a lot to take on by yourself.  There's the killing, the plucking, the gutting, the washing, the parting out, the packaging.  And let's not forget the clean-up afterward.

Seven hours after I began, it is all done.  The killing.  The plucking.  The gutting.  The washing.  The parting out.  The packaging. And yes, the clean-up.  Including cleaning up me with a long hot shower so I don't smell like dead chicken.

broilers enjoying their last meal,

 not knowing what the next day would bring

stump and hatchet ready

the chicken holding nails

hanging to bleed

Here our pictorial ends.  It is rather difficult to take pictures of yourself taking a chicken through all the stages from cluelessly letting themselves be caught (at least, the first few were easy to catch; after they left the pen and didn't come back, the rest got rather suspicious of me), to headless, to featherless, to removal of feet and wingtips, to gutting, to  cut and wrapped for the freezer.  It's a messy process, and I really didn't want to get my camera smeared with poultry 'products'.  I also just wanted to keep cruising through the process and get it over and done with as quickly as possible.

Now that it's over, I have come to a few conclusions.

--I don't want to do this again by myself.  My hands ache from the plucking and gutting.

--I still don't want to rely on the store for my chicken.  It's just not the same.

--For next year's chicken, I need to find someone willing to process it and package it into cuts for me without costing as much as the local processing plant.

--Or maybe I'll just stop dealing with raising broilers and find someone local who raises pastured chickens and offers them for sale.  Support small scale agriculture :0)

Yeah, it was that bad.  I've been there, done that, with the meat birds for about ten years now.  I still want my healthy, naturally raised chicken to eat.  But I don't think I can take processing them all by myself any more.  My hands are needed for too many other things to go on forced sabbatical because of chicken processing damage.  The last time I processed birds, it took three days for my hands to return to normal and pain-free.  I'm too young to feel like my hands are stricken with arthritis.

As an added point in coming to this conclusion, the concluding of my broiler processing endeavor, my ten-year-old butchering stump is shot.  It's really punky.  The nails popped out after chicken number five, and I had to keep monkeying with trying to pound them into a solid spot with the back of the hatchet.  No stump, no chicken-head chopping.  Decision made.

Let's Play a Game

This post is inspired by an assignment DD2 had the other night for her AP Environmental Science class.  She had from the time she got home from school, until the time she went back to school the next morning (so, after cheer practice which ended about 5:30 p.m. until about 7:20 a.m. when the school bus picked her up again, minus the seven or eight hours she slept and not counting the time she spent working on homework for other classes. . .) to list all the poultry products she could find in her home.

So, now I challenge you to take a few minutes (because we both know you're not going to wait until tomorrow morning to come back and read the rest of this post) to think how many poultry products you have at your house.  We'll include indoors and out, because, well, that is what DD2 did.

Ready, set, go!

(Imagine Final Jeopardy music playing here)



Okay, time's up!  How many did you come up with?  At this little place here, DD2 came up with 13 items, which ended up being about three times as many as her classmates.  She was rather proud of that, even though some of our items were considered, well, odd.

Here's what we have:

1. Laying hens
2. eggs from the laying hens
3. broilers
4. packaged chicken in the freezer 
5. a turkey in the freezer
6. chicken bouillon in the kitchen cupboard
7. canning jars of frozen chicken broth in the freezer (for future soup stock)
8. jars of chicken dinner mix in my farmers market stuff
9. a down coat
10. feather pillows
11. cat food ("poultry by-product" listed in the ingredients)
12. several wishbones lined up on the windowsill behind the kitchen sink
13. chicken litter (ie. the floor of the chicken coop currently, meaning the mix of sawdust and chicken manure)

When the teacher commented on the chicken litter, DD2 said "At our house, we try to use everything.  Chicken litter makes good fertilizer."

That assignment got me to thinking.  How aware are we of what resources we have in our homes?  Do we use as many of them as we could?  I know all too often I don't make full use of what is around me.

Torn

Yesterday we received a phone call from the high school. DD2 was not in trouble ;0).  No, it was one of those automatic-dialed, pre-recorded calls that they use nowadays to get information out to parents.

Even so, after listening to it, I immediately felt inner turmoil.  I'll try to sum up the call.

Basically, it was informing all us parents that the high school this year is joining up with some organized thing sort of like a food bank.  They are having a food drive--to last all school year--and the items collected will be divvied up between needy families in our school district.

That is all well and good.  Yes, I would like to help the needy in my community.  It is a small community, and there seems to be, from what I have observed through my ten years here, a large percentage of low income and poverty-level families.  So of course I'd like to help my fellow citizens who are struggling.

Except, and here's where the turmoil comes in, the food drive is only for non-perishable food items, and the phone call informed me that specifically macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, breakfast bars, instant oatmeal packets, granola bars, family sized cans of soup are desired.  The goal is to, on a weekly basis, provide each needy family with 3 days of dinner and breakfasts on the weekends.

Hmm.  I don't buy that stuff for my own family.  Ramen noodles I wouldn't eat if I was starving (tried them once, and they will never pass my lips again).  Mac and cheese boxes don't go very far, not nearly as far as a box of elbow macaroni and a jar of cheese sauce, which together cost only about double what the name brand box of mac and cheese goes for, but makes at least four times as many servings.

So, while I would love to feed all the hungry children of my school district, I don't want to feed them that stuff.  I'd much rather donate pasta, jars of sauce, the dinner mixes that I make and sell at the farmers market, homemade oatmeal packets, the same dry soup mixes (just add water) that I make for use at home instead of buying cans of creamed soups. . .   But that stuff is not what is wanted.  That stuff is a) questionable because it didn't come from a store and factory sealed, and b) takes too much effort to cook.

I'm torn.  I can't quite bring myself to go to the store and purchase the requested items.  Not just because I know there are cheaper alternatives.  Not just because I know there are healthier alternatives.  Not just because I know that scooping out a 1/2 cup of powdered soup mix and adding water then heating doesn't take much more effort and time than opening a can of soup, adding water and heating.

Yet, my help is not wanted if I instead donate all the homemade equivalents to those items.  And I don't want my donation to be tossed into the trash instead of being eaten by the hungry.

I'm torn.

What I wish could happen is that I could be partnered with a family in need.  That I could deliver to them some of the fresh bounty from my garden on a week to week basis.  That I could mentor the parent (or even middle school and up aged children, maybe it is even more important to mentor the children) on meal preparation.  That I could show them that cooking isn't a burden.  That all food doesn't have to be taken from a box and put into the microwave in order to have a quick meal when you are short on time.  To teach them to prioritize their time and that a half hour spent cooking is much more important than a half hour in front of the television.  To give them my homemade maple syrup in the spring and share my pancake recipe with them (I'd even provide the flour, sugar, salt, baking powder and vegetable oil for it too). To give them fresh eggs when I have them coming out my ears in the spring and early summer.  To give them asparagus in May when we are eating it almost daily.  To give them fresh chicken when I butcher my broilers, and fresh venison in November.

Lest I be accused of not knowing what it feels like to be in the shoes of a parent who works at minimum wage all week and comes home exhausted, not having time to cook a good meal, let me say "Yes, I do."  I have been there, and then some. And what I learned was cooking from scratch.  What I learned was that feeding myself and my kids was just as important as bringing home the paycheck that bought the food, and certainly more important than the time to watch one more tv show.  I learned that planning ahead doesn't take much time or effort, and whipping up a casserole the night before and putting it in the fridge to cook the next day when I have a shift that runs later isn't as much of a burden as getting off work and wondering if I have enough cash to pick up a drive-through dinner for my family on my way home.  I learned that fancy haircuts were not important compared to feeding my kids.  I learned that going to a movie was a want, not a need.

Okay, I'll stop now because I can feel this quickly turning into a rant on how many people spend their money instead of on food for their family.  I'll just add that when there was $45 in the budget to buy a weeks worth of groceries for five of us, my family did not eat out, we didn't order pizza, and DH did not buy beer even though he really would have loved to have beer after a long day's work.  We bought ingredients, and cooked them.  And our family was nourished, no child in my house ever went hungry, and every child drank milk.

So, I'm torn.  I want to help.  But the way in which I know there will be the most benefit is not how the help is being accepted.

Want Your Kids To Do Well In School? Cook With Them!

Do you want your children to do well in school?  Of course you do.  Every parent does.  I've never met one parent who said "I don't care if my kid gets good grades.  I don't care if my kid struggles in school.  I don't care if my kid learns anything."

So, let me ask you this.  When was the last time you cooked with your child?

No, really.  This is a post about kids doing well in school, and I am asking a question about cooking.

How does school success relate to cooking with your kids?

Well, numero uno is that if you cook with your kids (which, I admit, when you are time-strapped and starving, can be a big pain in the a**), you are obviously involved with them.  If you take the time to cook with them, to teach them about food and food safety, and feeding themselves, you are more involved with them than the parent who doesn't.  And, IMHO, a major key to having kids that are successful at anything is having a parent (or other significant adult) who is involved.

A second way that cooking with your kids helps them in school is that they learn to pay attention to details.  How does a carrot differ from a piece of bread?  From a slice of cheese?  From a can of soup?  Well, a carrot doesn't melt on the counter on a summer day like a slice of cheese will.  You can't ball it up in your fist like you can a slice of bread.  You can cut it and it doesn't run all over the place, like if you open that can of soup and tip it sideways.  A carrot is a solid, it's very firm, and it's shape is not much affected by temperature changes. On the flip side, all those items are like a carrot in some way.  They are all edible (well, the soup is, not so much the can).  They can all be cut (the can, not so much the soup).  Cheese can be orange like a carrot.  Cheese and bread can both be grated like a carrot.  If you heat the bread too long, it turns black, and so will a carrot if heated too long.   So, cooking can be a way to teach lots of observational principals, as well as many science topics.

Cooking can teach and/or improve counting skills.  I need 8 cups of sliced apples to make a pie.  My little kids can count each cup as I slice enough apples to fill it, then dump the cup into the bowl where the sugar, flour, cinnamon and nutmeg wait in preparation of becoming pie filling with the apple slices.  They can learn addition skills, and even multiplication, if I use the 4-cup measure instead of the 1-cup:  4 cups plus another 4 cups makes the 8 cups needed for the pie; we fill the 4 cup measure twice, and we have enough apple slices, so 4 times 2 equals 8.  Math that is tangible, math without tears.

Cooking can also teach fractions.  Slice a sandwich in half at lunch time.  Then, in half again for four equal sections.  Viola, quarters!  And mini sandwiches that small children will think are just too cool for words.  :0)  Older children, who recognize fractions, can practice multiplying and dividing them by making a recipe bigger or smaller, thus needing to change 3/4 cup of milk in the pancake recipe to 1 1/2 cups for a double batch of pancakes, or  1 1/3 cups sugar in the 9" x 13" pan size recipe of peanut butter swirl brownies to 2/3 cup sugar for a recipe that will fit into an 8" x 8" pan.  (I realize the brownie example is unrealistic: nobody ever wants less peanut butter swirl brownies.  In my defense, I sell them at the farmers market in 8" x 8" pans, hence the need to sometimes halve the recipe.)

Cooking teaches measuring skills.  How are solids measured?  How are liquids measured?  When measuring something, do you look up at it?  Down at it?  Sideways at it?  Or do you adjust to be at eye-level with the thing you are measuring?  This is something DD2 commented to me last week on her second day of school--her junior year of high school--when she was telling me about an activity her Chemistry class had done, and how she was one of the few people in the class who knew how to properly measure a liquid.  She incredulously asked her classmates:  "Do none of you cook?!?" because that is where she learned to measure liquids, in the kitchen helping her mother cook.

Cooking teaches a lot of science.  Heating causes chemical reactions that change the physical properties of many foods.  Hence an egg, which is pretty liquid once you remove the shell, becomes a solid when you hard boil it, fry it, scramble it. . .   Butter, a solid, becomes a liquid when you heat it.  And if you heat it at too high a heat for too long, it goes from a pale yellow to a brown or even black color.  What about if you mix baking soda and vinegar?  What happens?  Gas is released: a chemical change made visible when foaming occurs at the point that the two substances mix and react.

Cooking also teaches reading.  How can you try a new recipe if you don't know how to read the words in the cookbook?  And how well does the recipe turn out if you don't read the words in the proper order?  Or if you read 'bake 30 minutes' as 'broil 30 minutes'?  Not going to get the same results broiling as you would baking.

Cooking teaches patience.  Not always do we get what we want when we want it.  I might want a chocolate chip cookie, but if I eat one straight out of the oven things aren't going to turn out all that well.  Most likely I'll remember the blisters on my tongue and roof of my mouth made by the 375 degree molten chocolate more than I'll remember how that cookie tasted.  I must wait for the cookie to cool before I can eat it.

Cooking teaches that things come with effort.  You have to put in some time, some effort, sometimes even some muscle (ever kneaded bread dough by hand?), to get a meal.  It doesn't just magically appear on the table at scheduled times.  Back to that apple pie with the 8 cups of sliced apples. . . have you ever made a pie completely from scratch?  Have you pared and cored and sliced the apples?  How long did that take?  Have you measured and mixed the filling ingredients?  Have you made the crust yourself--and how long did it take, how many frustrating attempts, before you got the hang of rolling out the dough for the pie crust into a nice even circle?  An apple pie takes nearly an hour to bake.  Then longer, even, than that to cool enough to be able to be eaten.  Talk about effort, patience, perseverance (rolling that darn pie crust just right) and the concept of delayed gratification!

Hmm.  Effort.  Patience.  Perseverance.  Delayed gratification.  Aren't those some very real things that are required for success in school?  Success in life?

Cook with your kids.  It will do them a world of good.