Goats, Kids and Kitties enjoy hay in different ways!
I hope everyone is enjoying a healthy new year so far! Full of good food and good plans! We will be updating our garden planting schedule for the year this week. It’s crazy to think we plan about food so far in advance! We will even order our baby turkey’s for Thanksgiving soon! That is so we get the best dates for hopefully having the best sizes for everyone’s table! Of course as with all of farming a lot of that depends on weather. We are still enjoying a few extra big turkeys left from this years harvest. Yum!
So this time of year we love to make a new menu. Our meal planning is relaxed because we eat seasonally so it isn’t about deciding what exactly I want to serve, but what I’ve been provided with and how I want to use it. I also have to be relaxed since on the farm things can change quickly. Like when baby animals are being born and you can’t predict when it will happen. Or worse, when something goes wrong and something is broken or an animal is sick. But if I have an idea of what we are eating then I can quickly substitute an easy meal for a more difficult one when I need to save time.
It really helps to choose my meat ahead of time and have it thawing in the fridge. That makes changing my plans easy. We tried some new fun things this week. We took some beef bones and made some Pho broth. We will have some for sale at CSA pick up. It was really good and just took time, but wasn’t hard. Then we thinly sliced carrots and onions and chopped some Tat Soi and added some rice noodles and had a fun dinner! We will also be making a great Thai chicken soup this week. It’s pretty easy to adjust the veggies based on what I have as long as there is a cooking green, onions and carrots. I hope this inspires you to try something new!
We also had a fun preschool craft we did. After the beef broth was made there was a lot of tallow that we took off the top. We took pine cones and smeared them with the fat and then rolled them in birdseed. This was a very messy and fun project! We then tied them up on our front porch and are watching the birds enjoy themselves!
Herbal shares this month are cinnamon honey (great by the spoonful or in tea for illness), herbal tea to chase the germs away, and elderberry syrup (refrigerate or freeze within 2 weeks)! Fermented shares are elderberry switchel and fermented radishes. Enjoy and be well!
We have meat pick up today and Saturday 2-5 PM and look forward to catching up with folks!
Blessings,
The Bakers