What a fun night!

We had the pet chicken come for a visit the other morning!

We were settled down by the fire with dinner on the stove. Mama and her littles were gathered around playing and reading and waiting on the larger ones to come in for dinner when she got the call……Farmer Sean and the big girls were off fetching some rabbits from a friend and Tommy was milking the cows. It was cold, dark and starting to rain. And for the 7th time that week, our naughty cow was loose and at the neighbor’s house. So we bundled as quickly as possible with a 5 year old, 3 year old and 1 year old! Just as we got to the barn to ask Tommy how we could help, he informed me that two of the dairy cows had taken off in the wrong direction and were “at large”. Ok, so it just got more interesting! Too bad the border collie pup isn’t useful yet.

The only logical thing was for Tommy to head out to look for cows and for me and the littles to put away milk and clean up from milking. Ok, perfect, Tommy and Cadi (the border collie) headed out for their part in the cold dark night. Keeping a small person out of trouble while finishing the milking is exciting to say the least. In the end the two escapees from the dairy herd were not far away and the gentle (though naughty) giant cow at the neighbors came home obediently, She took one looks at Cadi’s unhappy look and figured she’d better listen. And other than Farmer Johnny trying to eat the baby seedlings in the warm room in the barn, we all survived! Thankfully dinner was ready and waiting when we all made it in the door!

Never a dull moment here! Your shares for this week include white sweet potatoes, white potatoes, cabbage, mustard greens, arugula, and lettuce. We are going to peel, chop and roast our sweet potatoes this week. The regular potatoes are on the menu for mashed potatoes with salad and sloppy Joe;s this week! We make our with some ground beef and sausage, ketchup and homemade mustard. YUM! Growing up I thought sloppy Joe’s were some unhealthy, gross thing. Now made with healthy ingredients I love serving them to my family! They are so yummy! Instead of buns we just put it on mashed sweet or regular potatoes.

The mustard greens are great in any stir fry recipe. And we are happy the cabbage finally formed heads! Weird weather sometimes makes harvest unpredictable. I love to make steamed cabbage, but there are so many ways to use it. The arugula is a nice spicey green, great with creamy dressings. We are also enjoying lots of roasts lately. I made a beef roast just by flouring both sides, browning it and then putting a quart of broth in with salt and pepper and simmer all day on the stove. During the last half hour i put in carrots and potatoes. We had unplanned guests that we invited for dinner and just added extra veggies. It worked out perfectly!

Enjoy the cold rainy days because the plants really do want some winter, even if we are ready to skip it! Blessings,

Your Farmers

Meat week is coming!

Farmer boy enjoys his CSA share before mom even cooks it!

Wow, where did January go? Well, this Saturday is meat pick up as well as next Thursday. So it’s time to stock up! We have been enjoying bone broth to help with the winter illness and it’s kept most of us healthy this winter. Along with lots of ginger and garlic! We’ve been adding it to the broth when we make it. So don’t forget to get some beef bones and use the bones from your whole chickens! Broth is so easy and nutrient dense. We just simmer a pot of bones, water, splash of vinegar and sea salt (adding whatever veggies or peelings you have leftover) all night after we eat chicken and then strain the next day. Then it’s soup time!

Have trouble getting your children (or husband) to drink broth? Two easy ways to get more into your picky folks (besides soup) is by replacing half the water with broth when you make rice and also who doesn’t like oriental food? We make this awesome brown sauce to serve over rice, any meat and pretty much any stir fried veggies. In the summer we use summer squash and onions and lately we’ve been loving the asian greens (tat soi, napa cabbage or mustard greens) in this dish. For the sauce I just take a whole head of garlic and peel and chop it, I fry it in some butter for a few minutes and then add 4 cups chicken broth, 1/2 cup liquid aminos or soy sauce, 1/4 cup maple syrup and I combine a 1/2 cup broth and 4 TBS corn starch. Just simmer until thick. Then just doctor it up as you need with more soy sauce. Adding orange juice can be fun, but then you need to use arrowroot powder instead and don’t boil as it doesn’t like to thicken when boiled. It’s been voted a favorite this winter in our kitchen. I plan to make french onion soup soon too as it’s a farmer favorite too!

Farm life is bubbling with puppies and the new calf is out in the field to be seen now. We named her Mercy. The puppies are growing by leaps and bounds and just started eating puppy food. Wow if I thought toddlers were messy eaters! Young puppies eat like little piglets, only worse! So after their first meal they had their first baths. We have baby peppers and tomatoes growing in the safety of the barn with grow lights. Only a little winter left folks, well that is what it feels like anyway. Maybe February will be colder, but it feels like spring is coming!

Farmer Johnny had his first birthday and he loves time spent in the green house! We have just seeded more carrots and we have greens getting ready to replace a whole 100 foot bed of greens that we have all enjoyed this winter! We sure love the new green house! What a huge blessing! OH and this week we are sending out beets, white sweet potatoes, lettuce mix, asian greens, kale and WONDERFUL cabbage kohlrabi ginger kraut. Farmer Sean made it and maybe he’ll take over the fermented shares as it’s the best we ever made! Enjoy on sausage sandwiches, or alongside anything! Today we made buns and shaped loose sausage into hotdog shapes and had the kraut on top! It was a huge hit! My new favorite way to eat the white sweet potatoes is by making scalloped potatoes with them. The sweet and salty mix is great!

See you soon!

Blessings,

The farm mama

Elderberry buds

Baby bunnies learning to eat their greens!

One of our winter activities is pruning the elderberry to make more plants. This year we have a huge one that was planted by our local birds right in our front window. It’s actually been there for 3 years and I’ve been meaning to move it. Not it’s huge and can’t be moved so we have made it all into cuttings to enlarge our elderberry orchard and also to have cuttings and potted plants to sell in the spring! We usually do this around the end of February, but this year the poor plant thinks spring has come already! It doesn’t realize it’s only January. So we got our pruners out yesterday and started chopping! It’s good timing since I am fighting a cold and need some elderberry syrup! I’ll be making a batch of that later today with the berries we have in the freezer.

Have you ever made your own syrup? It’s not hard and I should have been taking some already to prevent the cold, but I hadn’t made enough last month. I like to freeze my berries on the clusters and then once frozen they can be shaken into a huge bowl to make the berries fall off and discard the stems. When making syrup I cover the berries in water and heat, bringing to a simmer for about an hour. Or you can do this in your instant pot. I also like to put ginger, cinnamon, and cloves in with it for a more powerful syrup. Oranges or lemons are a nice addition too. When I am satisfied that the herbal properties are extracted I strain the herbs out and add raw honey to the liquid. And there you go, a nice cold and flu prevention syrup! It keeps in the freezer for a year or the fridge for a few weeks. But remember, it doesn’t do you good in the bottle, so drink up!

This week we are munching on comfort foods, we did hand cut steak fries last night with potatoes. We just massaged lard onto them and salted them and roasted at 400 until crisp. What a treat! We are also going to have some cubed sweet potatoes done the same for this evening. Nice warming foods for cold days! We make hamburgers with ground beef and ground pork sausage mixed to go along with our fries. We usually skip the buns and serve with salad and kraut and finish with a cookie! I figure no bun means room for cookies! We also are having mustard greens sauteed with onions and sausage tomorrow night. Oh and the greenhouse mix! It’s mainly arugula and so mild this time of year! Super yummy with feta cheese on top and we made some crispy sunflower seeds. Sorry I didn’t measure, but I took some butter a little honey, cinnamon, salt and just stirred the seeds over medium heat until crisp. What a fun salad topping!

Enjoy your week!

Blessings,

The Bakers

Wintery Mix!

We are battening down the hatches here because the mama farmer doesn’t like to be cold!!!!! So all the animals have extra bedding and hay and I’m going to hibernate while everyone else does chores! Just kidding, but I am happy to be cooking and doing indoor jobs! At the least the room in the barn that we do our seeding in is heated. I did turn the heat up a little, I hope the wood choppers don’t mind!

We are up to our ears in puppy snuggles, they are opening their eyes and are super cute! The calf is romping around in the barn and doing great. We still haven’t named her, but we love snuggling her. When it gets a bit warmer she’ll move to a hutch closer to the cabin for all to enjoy! For now, she’s loving the barn life!

OK, let’s talk soup for a minute. I have been cranking out the soup lately. My new best creation is Chicken Thai soup. I think I made a different one a few weeks ago, but my new one is yum! I just cooked a frozen chicken in the instant pot (for quick easy prep), pulled the meat and chopped it. Then I add the bones to some broth I had going on the stove already to keep the broth going! I took some broth from the last batch and chopped my Tat Soi (it’s the green bouquet type of veggie from this week) and some thinly sliced carrots, diced onions and mushrooms, chopped fresh ginger and garlic and a little fish sauce. No measuring necessary, just wing it! It was a hit! We added rice noodles to the second batch to pretend we were at a restaurant!

Pick up tomorrow may be a little slippery so we will be putting CSA out by 10 AM incase the weather holds off and you want to come early. If you can’t make it here we will put the shares in the fridge for pick up anytime next week. If you won’t be coming to pick up your shares, please let us know so we can donate your produce to someone else.

Enjoy!

Blessings,

The Bakers

Iron lady, Indigo Apple, Mountain Magic, Cherokee Purple.......

Here is Cuddles two years ago with our Bernese Babies, she helped raise them and loved them!

Did anyone guess what we are doing this week? Ordering seeds! Those are just a few of the tomato varieties we plant. We thought about cutting down the variety this year and decided that is too boring so the list goes on! So if any CSA members have something they are dying to try, let us know and maybe we can fit it into the planting schedule! This month we will start seeds for our greenhouse peppers, tomatoes and lots of greens for spring. Then February comes and I cannot begin to list everything that gets planted that month. It’s a busy one! All those baby plants to tend to again, we can’t wait! Baby plants are like any baby thing, they are cute! And have such promise for things to come!

Speaking of things to come…..Dolly’s second litter has arrived! We have 11 precious baby Bernese Mountiain babies! They are so sweet and Dolly is being a super mom! They came at a nice time as we just said goodbye to our old faithful golden retriever, “Cuddles.” She went to sleep Saturday and didn’t wake up again. We enjoyed taking her on a trail ride on Christmas Eve with the horses. The puppies are a welcome distraction!

This week in your shares you will find lettuce (oh glorious lettuce!), mustard greens, spinach, and roots galore! We made an awesome spinach dip this weekend with homemade cream cheese, ranch mix, chopped onions and instead of spinach we used mustard greens that we boiled and drained first. We also are enjoying salad nightly. We make our own dressing and use a super simple recipe: 1 cup olive oil, 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar and 1/2 cup maple syrup. So simple and so good, not to mention good for you!

We have also been roasting chickens and making chicken pot pie and chicken fried rice. Then we boil the bones and make great broth!

Enjoy!

Blessings,

Your Farmers

Cooking Time!

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

Happy New Year!

From your “Farm-ily”! This picture was taken at Mabry’s Mill during a late summer trip we took. We hope you had a lovely holiday and have a Happy New Year! We have been having cozy evenings by the fire reading books and playing games. During this warm weather we have been getting the cow’s winter housing finished up before the nasty winter weather sets in. It’s always a blessing to have better weather longer than you expect. It helps you get ready for when it’s going to be rough on the animals and crops. Cold rain is the hardest to deal with for animals. Well for people too!

We are having awesome winter meals lately! We are making lots of soups with the root veggies. A member made a split pea soup with a ham bone and beets and carrots, they really enjoyed it. It’s hard to go wrong with any combination of winter veggies and soup. We are loving having salad so far into winter this year, that keeps your vitamins and minerals up to fight colds and flu. It also makes me feel healthier after indulging in lots of Christmas sweets! Our special surprise this week in shares is Brussels Sprouts. I sauteed onion in a big dutch oven with lard and butter, then added a little more and tossed the brussels sprouts in. I put the whole thing in the oven at 425 for about 30 mins. While that was cooking I took 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar and 1/2 raisins and boiled them in a small pot and then turned it off and let them absorb the vinegar. When the sprouts were done roasting I tossed the raisins on top and added some crumbled bacon too. It was grand! We are also enjoying Kale, mustard greens, sweet potatoes, and carrots this week.

I have been keeping up with our yogurt making as well. Once you get a system, it isn’t hard to keep it going. I heat my milk to 180, then I cool it with an ice paddle. This really speeds up the cooling time since I do about 2 gallons at a time and it can take a LONG time to cool. That way I don’t feel like I have a project going all day. Then when it reaches 115, I add the yogurt starter and mix well. Then I put the mixture into jars and into the dehydrater for 4 hours at 115. Super easy breakfast with our homemade granola on top! We have granola in the cabin for sale, but sorry we aren’t offering yogurt at this time.

We can’t believe it’s time to think about the major spring planting! We will begin ordering our seeds in the next week. If you have any veggie requests please let us know! This year we are trying to have tomatoes earlier, longer and more of them! If only they were as disease and bug resistant and okra and eggplant! HA HA! Enjoy your food and family and friends and count your blessings as we enter a new year with so much potential!

ALL CSA and MILK SHARES are available at regular times. Enjoy!

Blessings,

The Bakers

PS Remember to stay tuned for baby watch, “Ducklegs” is the mama cow due in January. She will be brought into the birthing area in a few days.

Merry Christmas

We are excited about spending time by the fire next week and hope you will all have a wonderful Christmas! We have been very blessed this year. The greenhouse is making growing and harvesting greens this winter much easier and more enjoyable! We are getting ready to make our planting schedule for this coming year and it’s very exciting! Winter is such a nice time to recoup and regroup! We will also be thawing a big turkey to enjoy on Christmas, along with some butternut squash pie and sweet potatoes. Oh and spinach is coming your way this week too! I love a spinach salad with some dried cranberries on top. The napa cabbage is awesome either cooked or raw, it makes nice wraps. I love to shred carrots and chop the napa with some nuts and dressing of choice for a nice slaw. If you add some cooked shredded chicken its a whole meal!

In the garden this week we have put the winter frost blanket on the strawberry plants. They had a make shift cover before, but now we have the proper one on. Those little babies are snug and warm (well as warm as they can be in 20 degrees!) The garlic is poking up and about 4 inches tall, looking very brave in the garden all alone! There are other veggies out there still, like the kale and cabbage, but they have blankets on and the garlic is the only thing uncovered. It will be fine and dandy all winter long. No wonder it’s so tough on illness, it’s one tough plant!

The dry dairy cows and beef cows will be coming “home” for winter soon. They have run out of grass in the pasture a few miles from here and the water supply is soon to freeze. That means moving some fence and setting up some winter hay feeding area for them. We have a new calf due January, brrr! Stay tuned for news about that. Ducklegs is the mama expecting. She also is coming home from the far pasture for us to take special care and prepare her for her labor.

We hope you enjoy all the farm goodies and have a wonderful Christmas!

Blessings,

The Bakers