Strawberry Jam Cake, Cookies and Cream, and Peeps

 

I baked a cake!  A strawberry jam cake, with jam in the batter and between the layers.  Three layers!  We had more than one family birthday to celebrate, but we didn't have a big firefly party like memorial weekends of years past.  It was too cold for the pool, but the fireflies showed up to entertain us, and the strawberry cake disapeared.  

The farmer who sold us Pistol Pete, our ram, asked for some photos so he could see his progress.  I thought this photo makes him look strong.  He is strong.  He head-butted me in the backside when I crossed his pasture, and nearly knocked me down!   

I was very offended by this.  It's one thing to accidently get knocked around by a skittish animal, but this was intentional and pre-meditated!  Now I watch my back when I'm in his pasture.  

Brandon bought two new ewes from the sheep farmer.  One of them has pretty brown wool, and I named her Cookies.  The other is a pale creamy color, so she was named Cream.  Cookies and Cream call to Lambchop like she's their mother, but we're keeping them seperate until they settle in and we know they aren't sick. They seem very healthy and energetic.  They are only four months old, and very skittish.  I can sneak a scratch behind their ears while they are eating, but they run when they realize what I'm doing.  I don't know how I'll ever catch them to trim their hooves.

Lambchop's little lambs are growing fast.  She's a good mother too. I think her un-shed wool looks like a rump toupee!  She doesn't like it when I try to pull it off.  The ground all around her barn looked like snow, she shed so much wool.  Just imagine what it will look like when there are five ewes shedding next year! 

The donkeys haven't started their heavy shed yet.  They still have the cute fuze around their faces.  

A box of chicks came through the mail.  Fifteen mixed breed layers, plus ten of the pearl white leghorns, which are small birds and make big white eggs.  Most of these will go to my parents or my boss, but I get to enjoy raising them in my brooder box for their first weeks.  I stored spare hoses in the box over the winter, and when I pulled the hoses out to get ready for the chicks, mice crawled up the hoses and gave me a scare!  Brandon turned the box upside down and stapled wire screen over the bottom, so hopefully the mice will not get back in.  

I really like raising chicks with the artificial hen/warming plate rather than the heat lamp.  The chicks snuggle under it and sleep so quietly, and I don't worry that I'm going to burn the barn down.  

They're so cute!

Chili Competition Pie

Jamie won our annual work chili cook-off this year.  There were nine entries, and he won first prize, which is a day of paid leave.  Instead of entering a chili in the competition, I baked pies.  The award for pie baking is the joy of crafting the pies, followed by the pie admiration of my coworkers, and then the miserable state of everyone's digestion after eating nine bowls of chili and giant hunks of pie for lunch during a work day!   

I enjoyed making these pies so much I couldn't resist taking photos. Cutting butter chunks into flour is so satisfying.   

Apples, peeled and ready to fill a crust. 

I made a little extra dough for each pie this time, and it was nice to have plenty to cover the dish, and even a little extra for a tiny bonus pie.  

Flipping the rolled out dough into the pie plate is always tricky.  But look, I did it perfectly this time! 

Isn't it pretty, with the edges all crimped?  

The apple peeler/slicer crank tool thing I have always leaves a little bit of peel on the slice at either end of the apple.  These slices with peel were perfect for the tiny bonus pie made from the extra bits of dough.  

Cinnamon and sugar, poured over the apple slices.  Oh yeah.  

Then a mixture of flour, sugar, and butter sprinkled on the top.  

Baked to golden perfection!  

While the apple pie was baking, I rolled out the dough for the chocolate pie.  Success!  

The chocolate, sugar, butter, egg yolks, and evaporated milk are heated on the stove top until the butter melts, then poured into the unbaked crust.  I used up all the extra bits of dough in the little bonus pie, making the crust extra thick so I only had to steal a little filling from the big pie. 

When the pie was nearly done baking, I used the egg whites and sugar to whip up the meringue.  I even added and extra egg white, so it would be tall and fluffy.  The meringue goes on the hot pie, then back in the oven until it's golden brown.  

The meringue is always taller out of the oven than it is when it cools.  I wonder if there's a way to keep it from shrinking?  

Brandon was prepared to be dissapointed that I was baking pies for a party he wasn't able to attend, so the little bonus pies were perfect.  He got to have a slice of the pie, but we didn't eat an entire pie all by ourselves!  

October Things

My brothers and I celebrated our birthdays this October, and I baked two cakes!  Real cakes, with gluten and sugar and all the bad wonderful tasting things.  The cakes were a treat to eat, and also a treat for me to bake.  We would have needed one hundred and nineteen candles to represent all our years!   

Our traditional October birthday family meal is chili spaghetti, Cincinnati style, topped with shredded cheese, diced onions, and oyster crackers, and served by the fireside.  This year, along with regular spaghetti and gluten free spaghetti, we served spaghetti squash grown in my garden, which has been stored in the root cellar.  

I baked the squash halves at four hundred and sixty degrees for an hour, then scooped out all the squash noodles into the crock pot, topped it with ghee patties, and turned it on low.  It worked pretty good!  I hoped that if I skipped the real noodles and crackers, then I would do less damage to my body when I ate two pieces of cake!  

It's hard for me to believe that October is already over.  October was the check-in on Ernest from the equine adoption agency.  I had to submit a picture of his body, from the side, and a photo of his feet.  In January they will remind me that his vet check-up is due.  If the vet says he's well cared for, then I think the adoption agency will be satisfied that we've provided a good home.  Ernest has settled in well, and feels free to bray for food and attention!  We can tell the two donkeys apart from their bray.  Rufus sounds like a rusty hinge, and Ernest sounds like an old fashioned car horn.  Aa-ooga!  Aa-ooga! 

The new puppy, Sienna, likes to chase the chickens.  Not with intent to eat or kill them, but she enjoys it when they squawk and flutter away. She's a ruckus instigator!  

When the puppy is on the loose, Cogburn, the rooster, clucks and calls all twelve hens together and leads them into the dense weeds in the tree line.  Most of the hens look ragged right now from the fall molt.  They look like scruffy ruffians hiding in the weeds!  

Look, a double rainbow!

The guineas are more brave than the chickens, so they don't run far when Sienna charges through their space.  Wendigo knows to pay attention when the guineas sound the alarm, and you can see her turn her head and prick her ears when they start to call.  She will follow them to the source of their excitement, and I've noticed the puppy following her lead.  Guineas and great pyrenness make a good defensive team.  

Pistol Pete, the ram, is growing a long shaggy neck ruff.  He's very shy and won't let me pet him.  When he sticks his head in his food bowl I sneak a few scratches between his ears.  He gets offended, and ducks his head.  He loves his daily pound of mixed grains, which I call cookies.  Who doesn't love cookies!   

Lambchop, the ewe, hasn't had her baby yet.  When we brought her home, we thought birth was imminent, but she just keeps getting fatter!  Sheep are pregnant for five months, so if her pregnancy started in July, it may be as late as December before we get a new lamb.  The reason the farmer wanted to sell her was because she was pregnant out of season, and will give birth during the cold winter.  My hope is that we can keep her lamb warm and help it survive despite being born in the wrong time of year.  If we can keep it alive, and it's a girl, then we will have another breeder.  Cross your fingers!  Lambchop is getting tamer by the day, and will even stay lying down while I pet her.  She's as soft as a cotton ball.  

Do you know how I can tell it's getting to be winter?  Is it the frost, or the dropped leaves?  Nope.  It's how many pictures I've taken of cozy cats!  

The cats and I are patiently waiting for the first inside fire.  Brandon has accused us of burning all the best, driest wood early in the year last year, so this year I'm wearing an extra sweater, and the cats are curled up somewhere snugly until real winter sets in.  It won't be long!  

Shuck Beans and Cabbage

The garden has been overtaken by weeds.  The ragweed is nearly twelve feet tall and has stems so thick they can't be cut with the weed eater, and need to be manually removed before they start dropping seeds.  The squash vines are dead, the cucumbers are buried alive, and who knows what state the potatoes are in - they haven't been seen in weeks.  

In the greenhouse, under domes of cloth, cabbages and rutabaga have been growing unsupervised for nearly a month.  They weren't watered, weeded, or fussed over in all that time. I was afraid to lift the cloth and see what was happening under there.  

But look, the rutabaga are growing!  I didn't get very many of the seeds to germinate, probably because it was hard to keep the soil moist under that hot greenhouse plastic, but once there were plants a few inches tall, I assembled the hoops and tucked them in.  They might actually make a rutabaga!

The cabbages were planted early, and were plagued by caterpillars before I managed to erect some homemade hoops from sticks and cover them with cloth.  I was fearful that they would be ruined.  

They had lots of bug bites on the outer leaves, and a few seemed munched by rabbits, but once I peeled the chewed parts away, I was left with a whole basket of little cabbage heads!  

After I harvested the cabbage, I pulled up all the weeds, sticks, and cloth, and now have a nice place for another crop.  I'm encouraged by the cloth covering.  I think if I put it on before the bugs lay their eggs, I might be able to grow a bigger cabbage head next time.  

A few years ago I met a man named John, who showed me photos of his green bean plants.  They were beautiful!  He had a whole wall of lush green plants and shelves of canned beans.  I've had his green beans in my mind for a long time, and this year I think I may have a trellis and harvest to rival John's.  

I've picked baskets of green beans.  Last night I made a meat loaf and surrounded it with green beans and onions and baked it all together.  The beans cooked in the juices from the meat and were so delicious.  We've saved all the dripping from baked chicken and baked green beans in it too.  So good!

In addition to the trellis in the garden fence, which is sixteen feet long, I planted beans inside a ring of tomato cages.   The beans flourished.  The goats realized they could climb on the cages and knock them over to get the tender vines on the top.  They gorge themselves, crush the cages, and make a mess of the vines.  I was half glad to think I wouldn't have to pick any more beans! 

Brandon helped me pound in some fence posts to prop the cages back up, and I crawled around inside the ring of beans and picked another giant basket full.  I don't think the goats ate enough to hurt the vines at all, and there are plenty of tiny beans still on the vines.  

Picking the beans is the easy part.  The tedious part is pulling all the strings.  

In years past, I've frozen green beans, and they are handy for soups and stews.  This year I cleaned up the food dehydrator and have been drying the beans.  They shrink so much it seems hard to believe it took hours of breaking beans to fill all the trays only to have a few quart bags.  Brandon's mom made the best beans from dried white half runner beans.  I hope my beans will be half as tasty as her shuck beans.   We'll see!

Changing Landscape

Look at all those pears!  The old pear tree in the front yard is loaded this year.  The pears are still small, but the branches are drooping from the weight of them.  

The branches make nice shade for some evening green bean breaking.  I still have bags of beans in the refrigerator, and it's time to pick more!  The small beans don't have strings, so I could just break them in pieces.  The larger beans have strings, but they have nice big beans in them.  

I spread the beans on cookie sheets and froze them, then dumped all the frozen beans in a big bag and put them in the freezer.  I've been warned that freezing them may make them rubbery, so this will be a test batch.  By freezing them on the cookie sheets before putting them in the bag, I should be able to just pour out the amount I need, because they won't be frozen into a lump.  

Some wooden stakes with orange flags tied to them have shown up in the field on the other side of the neighbors driveway and pond.  The stakes seem to be placed on the boundary between our good neighbors field and the adjoining property, which is a big field that occasionally gets mowed.  I'm guessing that someone is marking the property line because that the field is being sold.  Does this mean we may have a new neighbor?  I'm trying to appreciate my unoccupied view as much as possible now, just in case it's about to change forever.  

This landscape is always changing.  The small trees around the neighbors pond are growing into big trees, and the water in the pond is barely visible in the summer now.  The weedy fence line across the road is growing into a solid wall of small cedar trees, which will eventually change our view of the distant pastures and hay fields.  Our own property boundaries are sprouting saplings, and changing what we see.  The land here wants to be a forest.  It takes constant work by humans to suppress the forest, and maintain the open agricultural landscape. 

I think we will always have a big sky view. 

The trees can't grow tall enough to block our view of the clouds.