Carbon Steel Initiation

We got a new pan, a wok to replace our electric wok which had the nonstick coating flaking off. 

It's carbon steel, which is cared for similarly to cast iron. It gets seasoned with use, and the more you use it, the more nonstick it gets. 

It came with a coat of wax over the entire thing to protect the carbon steel from rusting and the seasoning from getting scratched. There were special instructions for first use. 

The person who sold it to us recommended putting it in the oven on warm on top of some old towels to catch the wax. 

It took a couple of times in the oven, mostly because I kept getting interrupted during the process. I did use paper towels to wipe off the melted wax that didn't drip onto the sacrificial shirt. 

We inaugurated the dewaxed and freshly seasoned pan with stir fry veggies of course! 

Now I'm curious... What else do you use a wok for???
 

Vanilla Mother

Somehow I came across this video on YouTube. Infinite vanilla extract? Using a mother jar? Consider me intrigued. 

Simple enough concept - have a big jar with all your beans and alcohol, fill a smaller jar for daily use, top up the mother jar as you take from it. The mother jar sits and extracts until you need it. 

The only rules are, fill up your "daily use" jar when it gets down to 1/3 left. Never drain the mother jar more than halfway empty. Always add a couple beans to the mother jar when you refill with alcohol. 

So, I combined both of my vanilla extract batches (one Madagascar and one Mexican), plus the vanilla extract I got as a Christmas gift from a friend and the jar of vanilla I found in my baking supply crate. 

The jar I wanted to use had cucumber chips in it, so I took those out. It's just a little bigger than a standard quart mason jar. 

We don't love eating the cucumber chips as a snack. Might as well try something new. I pulverized them in my spice grinder to make cucumber ranch powder. Who knows how I'll use that, but we have it available! 😂 Man, I make some weird things sometimes. 

Here's the mother jar with everything in it.

The most frustrating thing was trying to get all of the residual vanilla beans out of the old jars, haha. Lots of pouring back and forth... 

Of course, pouring all that vanilla from bottle to bottle resulted in a bit of a spill. Instead of wasting the vanilla, I dumped some sugar on it to absorb the extract. I'll use the vanilla sugar and some type of baked good. 

I poured off two jars to use right now. Well, one is going in the fruit room to be my backup. 

A Tale of Two Chickens

A friend of ours who raises chickens supplements their feed with Flock Armor, an egg and immune boosting powder. He's had great success with it. G sent me a picture of the package and it was all ingredients we had at home or would be easy to source. I smell a DIY project coming on! 

Of course I ran the ingredient list through chat gpt to get correct ratios. I also had chat adjust the recipe so one batch could be mixed in with 100lbs of feed (our normal chicken feed batch amount). Here's what it came up with for 12 chickens and 6 ducks: 

I had oregano from our garden last year and a bunch of old turmeric G brought into our marriage along with just enough nutritional yeast for the recipe. I had a jar of very old garlic powder I brought into our marriage that got used up. Lots of old spices used up! 

I ran a few things through the spice grinder, just to smooth it out a bit. Then I stirred it together and put it back into the empty brewer's yeast container. 😅

The chickens seemed intrigued by the sprinkling of powder I dusted over their feed. They don't have a great sense of smell, but all of these spices must have been strong enough for them to catch a whiff. 

I also dusted it over the feed bowls of our two mama chickens. Yes, those two broody hens up in the haymow hatched their eggs! 

They did a good job incubating them. We counted 16 hatched chicks. Unfortunately, most of them were dead when we found them; only five survived. 😭 

At first, we thought the cats had been picking off the chicks. The hens still had eggs underneath them that hadn't hatched yet, and G spent a good chunk of time making a fortification around the hens so the cats couldn't get to them easily. 

We debated pulling one hen and the hatched chicks and leaving the other pen to hatch the remaining 9 eggs. We weren't sure if the other hen would stick around to incubate the eggs if the chicks were gone. But, our incubator is up and running (another batch of duck eggs), so if she abandoned them, we would be able to transition the unhatched eggs into the incubator. After they hatched, we could reunite them with their mothers. 

That's what we ended up doing. G grabbed one of the moms and the four chicks and moved them to the back area where the goats kidded. Unfortunately, as soon as the chicks were gone, the other hen jumped down to fight the other hen for her babies. That's when we wondered if the dead chicks were a casualty of the moms fighting.

It wasn't until G left the shed and felt bugs crawling all over him that we realized there's a mite infestation in the haymow. Chicken mites don't transfer to humans; they love sucking chicken blood at night. During the day they hide in cracks, wood, and most likely in our case, hay bales. G checked the two mamas and found lots of the bugs on both. Ugh. The mites probably feasted on the babies and they weren't strong enough to withstand the attack. 

How to get rid of mites? Clean the coop, diatomaceous earth, and dust baths. These poor hens probably weren't leaving their nest long enough to take a dust bath. Mites have a lifespan of only 5-7 days, so we should be able to clear them out soon. 

G separated the two moms, sprinkled diatomaceous earth on the hay, and got them all settled with feed and water. He split the chicks up- two for each hen.

Only one more egg hatched after we relocated the eggs to the incubator, and the darker hen seemed to want it. She fluffed up as soon as she heard it peeping and came up to the door of her pen, ready to fight G for her baby. 

So, we have two good broody hens who are also good moms. Hopefully they'll be able to keep them alive and well once we turn them loose.

Easter Dessert

Dad requested I make Texas Trash Pie as the interest on his coupon since it took so long for me to redeem it. I thought that was a pretty good idea. 

I ended up baking it in the pre-baked pie crust I had planned to use for the French silk pie. I made a graham cracker crust for the French silk pie instead. Not sure why I switched, I think a graham cracker crust is more of a crowd pleaser than the standard pie crust, but maybe that's just my family. 

I wanted to use our green ceramic pie plate for the French silk pie, so I took the pie crust out of it and put it in a regular aluminum pie tin. It wasn't quite the same size, but close enough. 

The filling for this recipe is huge and I worried that it would be too much for the crust. It's so gooey with the sweetened condensed milk, chocolate, and caramel, that I thought it would bubble up and over and make a huge mess of my oven. 

So, I didn't put all the filling in, just enough to fill the crust. Then, I made a second crust out of pretzels (no graham crackers left) for the leftovers.

As you can see, it didn't smooth out like I thought it would. 

I baked it on an aluminum cookie sheet (in case of overflow) with another sheet above it so the crust wouldn't burn. That probably impacted the bake. As it was, the filling stayed lumpy and never filled in the cracks like I'd hoped. 

My second pie with the pretzel crust also flopped. The crust never came together! It stayed soft and loose even though I added extra butter and a few tablespoons of sugar to help it combine. The filling never spread out in that one either, so I ended up scooping the pretzel crust filling into the cracks of the regular pie crust. Trash is definitely an accurate description. 😂 I think it'll taste good though. 

What to do with the pretzel crust now? I had one brick of cream cheese left in the fridge, so I made a quick cheesecake. Since the crust never came together, I decided to do a bake to cheesecake instead of a quick refrigerator one. I had leftover caramel bits from the trash pie, so that made it easy to decide on a caramel cheesecake. I put a layer of caramel directly on the crust hoping that the caramel would help it hold together. There might be way too much caramel on the cheesecake, but it looks pretty tasty! 

 

French Silk

A looooong time ago, I gave my dad coupons for baked goods for Christmas. 

He gave them back to me that same day with his requests written in and said make them whenever. Unfortunately for him, whenever apparently = years. 😅 I've had them on my fridge since. Yes, in my little Courtland apartment, the Nicollet house, and now our Mankato house. 

My pie crust recipe makes enough for two crusts, a top and bottom. Since I only used one for the pumpkin pie, I had a crust leftover. Time to finally cash in Dad's coupon. 

I'd never made a French Silk pie before, but that seemed to fit the season better than pecan. 

Did I have all the ingredients? Eh, for the most part. No unsweetened chocolate. In true Emily fashion, I searched for a way to make it myself from scratch. Low and behold we had all the ingredients for that on hand. 

Melt cocoa butter in a double boiler, whisk in cocoa powder, cool (in small chunks for easier melting later). 

Looks beautiful doesn't it? Anyone who tastes is in for a rude surprise though - very bitter. 

Time for the innards. 

Pretty easy to mix those up. Cream butter and sugar. Add melted chocolate and vanilla. Beat in each of the three eggs for 4 minutes each egg. Spread in crust. Chill. 

Whipped cream on top. Voila! 

Eat It

Funny Jaron story. I have some pickled teeny brussel sprouts from our garden last year that I want to get out of my fridge, so I've been making a push to eat them. 

I offered some to Jaron for lunch today. 

He put one in his mouth, chewed it for a second, and then spit it out and said "no." 😂 

I said, "you're not going to eat that?" I ate one of the brussel sprouts on his tray. 

He said, "eat it," and held it out to me. (Sometimes he feeds me the things he doesn't want to eat). 

I opened my mouth so he could drop it in... And then he put it in his mouth. I guess it was worth a second try if Mom eats it.

But a moment or two later, he grimaced and spit it out, offering it to me again. 😂

I signed him up for a spring session of ECFE, a messy art session. We've gone twice so far, and both times he's eaten the art supplies. One of the stations was making cloud sand with baby oil and flour. Jaron kept putting fistfuls of the mix into his mouth. The helpers thought it was hilarious; they expected him to take one taste and spit it out. 

I guess that's what you get when you feed your kid weird food. They can't tell the difference between craft supplies and food. 😂 

Paint was this week's taste. I stopped him before he could eat too much. Thankfully there's been a water play table each week and Jaron happily spends most of his time there. He's needed a new outfit both times, but that's a small price to pay for not having to clean up the mess. 😊

Speaking of messes... He really enjoyed his blueberry sauce on pancakes the other day...

Note the blueberry on his eyelid, forehead, and arm. 😆

Eggshell Feeder

I caught Mina in the dog house the other day. 😂

I also caught our garlic coming up! 

Since Jaron and I were outside, I decided to do a little shed maintenance. Those pesky mineral feeders kept getting knocked down by the goats as they turn around to eat out of the end of the feeder. 🙄 One even cracked along the back where it hangs on the wall. I swapped the cracked one for the cat feeder. The cats won't mind a cracked feeder. 

I moved the mineral feeders to the back area away from the food. We have two varieties of mineral, mostly to test which the goats like more. The feeder on the right is the winner! DuMOR is the favorite. 

Next shed update was to make an egg shell feeder for the chickens. They need oyster shell or egg shells to give them calcium to keep their shells thick and hard. Whenever we put shells in the compost, the chickens eat them up right away, so they're definitely craving more calcium. I've been saving shells for a while, so I crunched them into smaller pieces and filled a juice bottle with them. 

The Internet provided the idea for a gravity fed feeder. Two boards, a tuna can, and a couple of screws are all you need. 

And a bottle and a couple zip ties too I suppose. 

They were easy enough to throw together, I made two more. One for kelp (provides iodine) and one for grit. They get enough grit free range from pecking at our driveway, but in the winter it'd be nice to supplement. 

Here they are hanging in the shed! 

I wonder how quickly the chickens will discover them.