Monday apples

It is late September and it is apple season!  Two weeks ago I bought a couple peck bags of McIntosh apples from a local grower that sells at the farmer's market in town.  Monday was my day off of work and my day to put the apples to good use.  One of the things that Mike LOVES is home made applesauce.  I usually use free apples from our own wild growing apple trees, but this year we had a late freeze that killed all the blossoms.  Oh well.  That just gives my business to a local farmer.  Apple sauce is one of my favorite things to make because it is so easy.  Normally the task is made so much simpler by the good ol' apple peeler/corer/slicer.  It is a wonderful tool that no apple lover should be without.  Unfortunately, I forgot how soft McIntosh apples are especially after they sit for two weeks in the house.  They would not peel cleanly at all without gumming up the peeler.  I even tried to put them in the freezer for a bit to firm them up.  No luck.  So I peeled them by hand and then ran them through the corer/slicer.  It still was about twice as fast as doing everything by hand.  I love that little contraption.

After slicing, I just load everything into my slow cooker which holds about 20 cups of sliced apples.  Add 1 1/2 cups of sugar, 1 1/2 tsp of cinnamon and 1/2 cup of water.  Cook on low all day long.  Stir.  Pack into pint freezer containers and off to the freezer so we can enjoy fresh apple sauce all winter long.  That 20 cups of apples cooked down to 5 pint containers.  Not a lot, but it is so easy to do that I don't mind doing a second batch when I get some more apples.  I will probably pick a firmer variety next time so I can run them through the peeler too.  I have used so many different varieties of apples to make apple sauce that I cannot remember them all.  They all seem to work just fine.  Maybe I'm just not picky.

I had 7 apples left over after filling the slow cooker so what to do?  Make apple crisp!  I used a new recipe I found that uses real maple syrup as the sweetener.  Boy was it ever an easy recipe to put together and it tastes great.  I found it on the allrecipes.com web site and it is called Maple Apple Crisp.  I read some of the reviews and used 1/2 the butter it called for and just a little less maple syrup and it turned out great.  We buy a 1/2 gallon of maple syrup every year from a local dairy farmer that has a sugar house and makes and sells his own maple syrup.  I LOVE real maple syrup.

 With the slow cooker doing its job, I turned my focus to the chickens.  I had enough whole chickens frozen from July's batch so this time around, I cut up 8 chickens and put them in packages.  4 packages of 4 boneless skinless breast halves, 4 packages of 4 thighs/4 drumsticks and 2 packages of 16 chicken wings.  Our freezer is filling up and looking much more respectable.  Yes I am still lamenting the loss of all our frozen food during the death of our last freezer in July.  I'm getting better now.  All I need is some venison and everything will feel normal again.

With a little help from our friends

This weekend was filled with friends helping us out.  It all started on Saturday when Mike and Steve packed up and headed home after working at the Howe Meadow Farmer's Market in Peninsula.  They were only a few miles down the road when Mike and Steve noticed the trailer they were pulling was vibrating.  Turns out one of the tires on the trailer had blown out.  Knowing that Dan Greenfield of Greenfield Berry Farms was right down the road that is where they headed.  Dan is one of the other vendors at the Howe Meadow market.  I met Dan when I went to the market with Mike a few weeks back.  Mike always introduces him to me as "this is the guy that makes maple syrup from hickory trees".  Well he does make a type of syrup from hickory trees, but obviously it's not maple syrup.  I need to try some sometime because I just find that totally fascinating.  Mike has tried it and said it is very good.

Back to the tire story.  Since Dan lives local and Mike and Steve were 70 miles from home, Dan brought out a local phone book and they found a tire store that was open and had a new tire the correct size.  So they took the tire off the trailer, loaded the blown out tire and rim into Dan's car and the three of them headed off to the tire store.  Then Mike, Steve and Dan ate lunch at a little mom & pop diner while the new tire was mounted on the rim.  About an hour later the new tire was ready to be picked up and they headed back to Dan's house to put the tire on the trailer and finally headed home.  So a BIG thank you to Dan for helping out.  What a truly nice guy.

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Sunday morning on the farm was our second of two butchering "parties" that we host each summer.  It's not really a celebration type party, but more like a gathering of friends to do a job that is made so much easier with many hands involved.  I wrote about our last butchering day back in July.  This one was pretty much the same except the weather was a lot cooler and it did not rain.  That made the entire morning much more enjoyable.  The first chicken was killed at 8:10am and everything was scrubbed clean and put away or at least spread out to dry at 11:06am.  We butchered 48 chickens this time around.  I'm going to put up some pictures to show the process, but be warned that some of these are very graphic.  If you don't eat meat or even if you do eat meat and you want to be blissfully unaware of how meat gets from the pasture to the table, then don't look at the pictures.  But before I get to the pictures, a quick story.  One of the young ladies that helped at the last butchering day could not be here on Sunday, but she wanted to buy two of our chickens.  Her friend told me that she will not eat chicken that comes from the large factory farms.  But when she came to our farm the last time and saw how humanely our chickens were treated, she had no problem taking a few of them home for her freezer.  That made me feel good because the whole reason I raise chickens to eat is so that I know exactly how they are treated their entire lives and also how they are butchered and handled all the way to the dinner plate.

So I'll start off with the first group of chickens after beheading.  We hang them to bleed out.  Seems like most people who do a lot of this used killing cones and slit throats.  We did that one year and it was a lot cleaner process, but the guys that do this job decided that liked the quick work of the ax better.

Next the chickens are taken to the scalding area.  We use two turkey fryers to heat water to 140 degrees F.  The chickens are dunked in the hot water for about 30 seconds to loosen the feathers.

Then they immediately go into the chicken plucker where they tumble round and round.  Inside there are rubber plucker "fingers" that pull off the feathers.  The hose is sprayed on the tumbling chickens to help wash the feathers out the bottom of the plucker and onto the ground.

 And in about 30 seconds, two chickens are plucked nearly clean except for a few tail feathers.

Then it is off to the evisceration table where several of us finish removing any feathers that didn't come out in the plucker.  Then we remove the feet and all the internal organs.

From there, the cleaned chickens are put into a large container of ice water to start chilling the birds.  After they chill for a bit, two of my friends that do the kitchen work are up next.  They take the cleaned and chilled chickens into the kitchen where they remove the necks, check for any left behind feathers and rinse the body cavity.  Then they bag them and put them in the refrigerator.

 When they are all done, the chickens look just like one you buy at the store, but without all the unknowns on how they were raised and killed.

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Today I spent a couple hours in the afternoon cutting up chickens for the freezer.  But I think I have blogged enough for today so I will leave that for the next blog.

T minus 1 day

The last batch of meat chickens this year will be butchered in the morning. I love raising chickens, but by the end of summer, I am not sorry to say goodbye to the chore of driving feed and water out to the meat chickens on pasture every day. It is especially challenging now with the days getting shorter and my work hours at the clinic staying the same. This is one chore that HAS to be done in daylight and it is a rush in the morning to feed and move pens and then get ready to go to work and then a rush to get home in the evening before it gets dark.

I did not have to do office hours today at the clinic so I actually slept in. Until 7am! That is an amazing feeling! I had so much energy when I finally got up. The morning was spent doing town chores: calling a couple clients with lab test results, post office, recycling center, feed store, grocery store. Then home for lunch and my required post lunch power nap. I cleaned house all afternoon getting ready for company coming tomorrow. Then after taking care of the laying hens, I moved all 48 meat chickens into the barn. My crate only holds 8 chickens at a time so that was 6 trips out to pasture and back to the barn. It was well after dark when I drove out to get the last group of 8 chickens. Thank goodness the chickens are white or it would have been hard catching the last few in the dark. But all are inside tonight and that will speed up the process tomorrow morning.

I mustered up enough energy afterwards to make double batch of blueberry muffins using frozen blueberries from our garden. That will be a nice surprise for the butchering crew when they get here tomorrow morning. Of course the fridge is stocked with beer for afterwards. Going to be a cool, but dry day tomorrow which will be better than our last butchering day in July when it rained most of the morning. Time to say goodnight.

Brownies and a Big Bus

Running a little behind the times with this post, but I wanted to put in a journal entry about this past weekend.  About a week ago, Mike told me that Trevor from Fresh Fork was putting together a farm tour for their CSA members and our farm was one of the stops.  "When is this tour?" I asked.  "This Sunday." said Mike.  Oh great.  Now I have to get the farm spruced up and looking good in short notice.  Thursday it rained.  Friday is premarket day plus I had a pre-wedding reception/pig roast that I needed to stop by Friday evening.  Saturday morning both Mike and I had to work.  So Saturday afternoon and a little on Sunday morning, I finally got around to picking up all the accumulated "stuff" around the barns, mowing 1/2 of the lawn and weed whacking around the buildings. 

Since lawn mowing is good for thinking, I decided that I wanted to have a little thank you for everyone who came for the tour on Sunday.  Plus I wanted to promote the farm a bit.  What I came up with was that I would make some whole wheat brownies made with wheat grown on our farm.  Last year we raised soft red winter wheat.  Most went to the feed mill, but we held some back and then this year after it dried, we took some of the wheat to an Amish man that has a commercial grinder and he ground it into wheat flour.  Soft red winter wheat is low protein flour so it makes what is known as pastry flour.  Not good for making bread, but works great in brownies (and the pancakes I make with it are pretty yummy too!).  I also like using this flour because I prefer to use whole wheat flours whenever I can.

Now somewhere along the way Saturday evening, my brain disconnected.  I usually cut brownies in an 8"X8" pan into thirds which = 9 brownies.  I decided that might be a little large for an afternoon snack after lunch so I divided the pans into fourths which somehow my brain managed to translate into 12 brownies per pan.  Therefore I would need 5 pans of 12 brownies to make enough for 51 people.  It wasn't until after I pulled the 5th pan out of the oven that I came to the realization that I had made 5 pans of 16 or 80 brownies.  I sadly broke the news to Mike that I made too many brownies and we would have to eat the extras.  He was so so sad.  *grin*

I've had a few requests for the recipe so here it is.  I actually took several different recipes and combined them into one, changed this, changed that and this is what I came up with.

Whole Wheat Brownies

Ingredients

1/2 cup melted butter

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/3 cup cocoa powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp vanilla

2 eggs

3/4 cup whole wheat pastry flour

1/2 cup semi sweet chocolate chips

Instructions

1. Lightly grease an 8"X8" pan. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
   
   
2. Combine melted butter, sugar and brown sugar.  Mix thoroughly. (I use an electric mixer here. You want the mixture nice and smooth.)


3. Stir in cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and vanilla. (Again I use an electric mixer for this step and then I throw it away.  OK, just kidding about throwing it way, but I hand mix everything after this step.)


4. Add eggs.  Stir until well mixed and smooth, but do not over beat.


5. Add flour.  Again, stir until moistened, but do not over beat.


6. Fold in chocolate chips


7. Bake approximately 25-30 minutes until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with wet fudgy crumbs.


8. Some people think these taste even better the next day after the whole wheat flour has time to absorb some of the moisture, but I like them any time, any way.

Sunday afternoon the tour bus rolled in around 3:30-4pm.  It's not everyday that a tour bus comes and parks in your driveway.  OK, I guess I am amused by small things, but I thought having a big bus parked in the driveway was cool. 

Mike walked everyone back to the fields for the tour of the 20 acre "garden".  I may be biased, but I think Mike is a great farmer.  He absolutely loves what he does and is very passionate about it.  He got to talk about why we have not chosen to go the organic route.  What it comes down to in a nutshell is that some vegetables will need to be sprayed for fungus or insects every once in awhile in order to save a crop.  Most vegetables never get sprayed with anything at all, but some will need it from time to time.  Just because something is natural doesn't mean it is safe.  Because we work in the fields and eat the vegetables ourselves, we want to use the safest chemicals possible.  That might be a natural product that is approved for organic use, but it might not be.  Mike showed the effects of downy mildew on the cantaloupe crop.  All dead.  We did get some harvested and sold before the fungus hit and killed the plants, but there is probably $1000 dollars of melons rotting in the field.  Downy mildew used to be a fungus that didn't appear until late in the growing season when the spores would come up from the southern states.  That was until farmers in Canada started putting up lots of greenhouses to grow vine crops.  In the spring they open up the greenhouses and the wind carries all the fungal spores south and so now we have to deal with downy mildew from the very start of the season.        

Mike did a great job talking about what we do and what challenges farmers face.   Challenges ranging from the weather to government regulation.  This is a subject I will be more vocal about on future blogs.  I loved how he talked about how farmers need to be able to let things roll off their backs.  A fungus kills all your melons.  Oh well.  A late freeze kills all your tomato plants.  Oh well.  It's too wet or too cold.  Oh well.  I spent most of the tour trying to distract Molly the crazy Brittany from getting in the way plus I was feeling a little under the weather from day 1 of the attack of the head cold.  I felt bad about not being more chipper and talkative, but that is how it goes when the virus strikes.

I hope everyone who visited our farm learned something about us and how and why we do things our way.  I know they had started their day at 8am and still had 2 more stops to make.  Bless their hearts.  Actually, I would have loved to have been on the tour with them.  I love seeing how other people do things and learn about farming methods for crops and animals we don't raise ourselves.