Goat Feeder Modification

The goats continue to waste hay. Likely a neverending problem, but I'm not ready to give up yet. The tray underneath is doing its job, but it piles up so quickly! 

I screwed in three more cross pieces to make it harder for them to pull the hay through. They can still easily get food, but hopefully now more will stay in the feeder with each mouthful. 

I also added a few more cross pieces on the side. 

 Not pretty, but it'll get the job done! 

Fire Cider

I still have a little fire cider left from last year, but it's time to make another batch. This time, I'll follow the recipe more closely. 😅 

It says everything should fit in a quart jar. And all the solid ingredients did, but there's no way four cups of apple cider vinegar will fit in there too. 

I cleaned out a half gallon jar for the two week fermenting period. Once I strain it, it can go in a smaller jar. 

G brought fresh horseradish root home from the garden center. I used up my frozen fresh ginger. Dried turmeric. Two spicy peppers from the garden, can't remember the specific variety. Not cayenne though. The rosemary came from our garden, but it already dried out, so not fresh. 😅 We had some fresh parsley on hand, so I added that to the mix. The only thing I didn't add was whole cloves. 

Ugh, I'm so irritated with myself. I ran out of ground cloves when I last made gingersnaps, so I ground up my whole cloves to be able to finish the recipe. A few days later, I discovered a half full bag of ground cloves meant to restock my baking container. At the time I thought, oh well. But now that I need whole cloves for a recipe, I'm annoyed. 🤪

The fire cider needs to be shaken every day, so I left it on the counter so I remember to do it. 

Garlic

Normally people try to plant garlic in mid-October. We didn't get to it until November, but the weather has been so mild I don't think it matters we're a little later than typical. 

G dug three rows under our trellis. We sprinkled in bone meal and compost. I spaced out the garlic cloves, and G covered them up. 

We have three varieties: German porcelain, Armenian, and Music. Maybe when we harvest next year I'll actually remember to check my notes so we can differentiate the kinds. 😅 

In other news, our neighbors gave Jaron an old trike their grandkids have outgrown. It's his new favorite thing to do in the driveway. 

We also chopped open one of the garden watermelons... It was ripe! 

A certain two year old has definitely enjoyed the sweet treat. 

Pumpkin Time

Now that Halloween has passed, people are looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas and getting rid of their pumpkins. The garden center was ready to offload the bulk of their pumpkins and squash. We were the happy recipients! 

G brought home a huge truckload. Jaron enjoyed handing us pumpkins to toss out for the chickens and ducks. 

Some of them are baking pumpkins, so we saved a bunch to cook up later. The rest are in a heap for our animals to enjoy. 

Heintz Heirloom Cookbook

Sunday night I heard G rustling around in the kitchen at 3am and wondered what he was doing...

Setting up this sign! 

Baby is officially considered early term. As far as we're concerned, he or she can come any time now. 😜

Most things I wanted to get done before baby arrives have been completed. Snacks and muffins in the freezer, baby clothes and other items easy to access, same for nursing clothes. 

The only thing left was to make a few more freezer meals. 

I made a pan of German pizza and another pan of lasagna. 

It's so tempting to eat them right away! 

I also made pastie pie. This time it's a blend of shredded potatoes, carrots, cabbage, onion, and ground beef held together with a couple of eggs to bind. 

My pie crust recipe hasn't been working for me lately, and G suggested I ask my grandma for her go-to recipe (and see if she had one that specifically uses lard). 

I was surprised to hear she uses a recipe from my great aunt that's in the Heintz cookbook. I had forgotten all about that cookbook! 

I was six when my extended family put it together. Some family members did artwork for the book. This is how I remember my great grandma Lillian. 

Here's the pie crust recipe Grandma mentioned. 

She actually uses a different one most of the time, a pat in the pan recipe, but this one has a lard adaptation. The other recipe seems to be enough for just one crust, and I wanted enough for two. 

Jaron got a little piece of dough to work with. He kept calling it pizza dough and then wanted to eat pizza for lunch. 😂 I stick his little piece on the edge of the pan to bake and he happily munched on it later. 

The dough certainly seemed flaky as I rolled it out. It held together well too. We'll see how it tastes after we pull it out of the freezer in a few weeks! 

Parent Teacher Conference Supper

The past few days have been busy in the kitchen. G signed us up to serve a meal to the teachers at the school connected to our church for Parent Teacher Conference night, and we decided to use the opportunity to make a triple recipe of our favorite meal-train meal so we could provide a meal for a few other church families (new babies and a death in the family). 

It worked pretty slick. 

I had made another roaster of applesauce last week, so we had plenty of that on hand for all three groups. 

The night before we served, I mixed up a double batch of gingersnaps to bake the day of. They were very easy to scoop with a muffin scoop being chilled from the fridge. 

The day of serving, I made a double batch of my go-to fresh bread recipe. I used the oven with the light on to get it to rise in a timely manner, and it turned out the best it has in a long time, possibly ever! 

G came home early from work to make the goulash soup. He was disappointed in the flavor. Instead of fresh garlic, we used up some minced garlic I had frozen longer ago and I think that made all the difference. Oh well. The people we're serving it to haven't had it before, so they'd never know the difference. 

One of the teachers is dairy free, which wasn't an issue for most of the items (cheese in the soup can be served on the side). But I forgot about dessert until the last minute. G wanted to buy a bar of chocolate for her, but I was stubborn and said if the rest of the meal was from scratch, then her dessert should be too. And it would take time to buy a dairy free chocolate bar, probably more time than it would take to whip up a dessert. 

A Google search for "quick, one serving dairy free dessert" brings up a gigantic list of mug cakes- cakes you mix in a mug and microwave for a few minutes. A recipe for vegan pudding caught my eye: one avocado, 3T cocoa powder, 3T maple/agave syrup, 2T alternative milk, splash of vanilla. Blend together. Done. Well, that sounds easy enough. And I had just made that frosting out of avocados and cocoa powder, so I had a feeling it would turn out. 

G made it in the magic bullet blender, which is good for small quantities, but I thought there wouldn't be enough moisture to get it to blend smoothly. I was right. It did an okay job, but you could see green chunks of avocado amongst the chocolate. Not very appealing. So I used my immersion blender to fix it. And it did the job. I licked the spatula and thought it tasted lovely. 

The teachers appreciated the meal. They said the bread was the best, the soup was filling, and the kombucha wasn't as bad as they thought it would be. 😂 

Garden Update

There was a freeze warning the other night (maybe two weeks ago?) so we picked everything that could be picked in the garden and brought it into the garage/house. 

We encountered a few surprises! 

Like this watermelon among the thistles: 

Is it ripe? I haven't cut into it yet to tell...

G found two yuzu fruits ready for harvest from the container plants. 

I found a few squash I hadn't expected after our battle with the squash bugs and mildew. 

There were a few pumpkins, much to Jaron's delight! 

All three of these are from our garden:

Jaron placed the bottom two in the arrangement. Since then, some critter (chicken possibly?) has nibbled on the white pumpkin. 

Here's what else we hauled out of the garden. 

Some of it I can use, but a lot is going to the goats. They don't seem to mind. 

We had a ton of teeny green tomatoes. Worth saving? Probably not, but I did anyway. 🤪 Also a handful of teeny bell peppers. 

By the time I got around to processing the leafy greens, most of them had dried out. Problem or preservation hack? 😂 I think I'll let them continue to dry out or freeze dry them to make a powder for soups and such.