Chicken Nesting Boxes

Battle of the nests is going on in our shed... The chickens love to lay their eggs up in the haymow, but they keep scratching all of the straw down so there's no bedding for them to lay in. I'm attempting to solve this problem by building a few more nesting boxes - some up in the haymow, and some down below. We'll see how they like their new options!  

It was a pretty quick build- leftover wood scraps screwed together into a box. Jaron handed me screws. 

Here are the haymow nesting options:

Now filled with straw to entice them in:

Since we have so many layers, I added a few more boxes next to their favorite laying spot. I'm hoping the taller wood will entice them in. 

To further entice them, I had my little helper "seed" the nests with fake eggs. 

 Do you think it will work? Which nesting boxes will become their new favorite?

Applesauce

My favorite way to make applesauce these days...

A five gallon pail of apples fits in one roaster. I used a hand held apple slicer to quickly cut them into smaller pieces. I don't need to peel or core them because I have a food strainer that filters all of that out. 

I left them in the roaster at 250° pretty much all day. This temp required little stirring. I stirred it when I thought about it, but it wasn't hot enough to burn the apples if I left it too long. 

Normally I like to run the apples through the food strainer right away after cooking, but it was bedtime so I let it cool down overnight and ran it through in the morning. Doing an entire roaster full of applesauce takes a while! 

Here's my setup:

My plan for the applesauce is to eat some fresh, make more fruit roll-ups since those are Jaron's current favorite snack, and try freeze drying some applesauce bites. Stay tuned for the applesauce bite experiment!

Fast Food

My cookbook sharing friend let me flip through a few of her current cookbook finds the other day. "What to cook when you don't feel like cooking" was the theme. The cookbook was neat because it had recipes organized by time needed to cook. 

This one caught my eye because we have a bag of tator tots in the freezer (leftover from tator tot hotdish). 

It was super easy and only used one pan, so cleanup was a breeze. 

I used freeze dried peppers instead of fresh, and they seemed to rehydrate okay. 

I left it sit in the cast iron too long after cooking... It didn't stick, but the moisture reacted with the metal and gave it a slight metallic taste. At least for my taste. That's happened with other foods too (that have sat too long and are acidic). G hasn't noticed, so maybe I'm just sensitive. 😅 

Definitely a recipe I'd make again!

Tomato Basil Soup Upgrade

Remember that failure of a soup I made about a month ago? The tomato basil goat milk soup that split and wasn't tomatoey enough? 

I had frozen the leftovers, thinking I'd make a pasta sauce sometime. Today was that day. 

It was so liquidy, I knew it needed to be reduced by quite a bit. Therefore, frying pan for more surface area. 

I thought about cooking noodles directly in the sauce to try to soak up some moisture, but I wanted to use rice noodles, and because they don't have the starch regular noodles have, they could turn soggy and gelatinous instead of a nice firm texture. (Thank you AI for the information). 

So the noodles cooked separately. 

The sauce took a long time to reduce, as I suspected. I added some tomato peel powder to thicken it, more salt, and a splash of lemon juice. 

Noodles added once cooked, and voila. 

It would've tasted nice with chicken, but I didn't have any around (besides our live ones outside 😅), so I served it with ground walnuts on top. Wow, did that elevate the flavor! 

Not a bad meal! 

RMH Meal

Jaron is almost two years old. How did that happen? 🤯 Isn't that always the case though? Time flies by. 

We had appointments in Rochester the past three days- general checkups, all went well- and we served our annual meal at the Ronald McDonald House to celebrate Jaron's birthday and give back to the organization that helped us so much when he was in the hospital. 

Our menu was the same as last year: homemade goulash soup, homemade bread, lettuce salad with tomatoes and cucumbers, homemade applesauce, and cookies. 

This year we used tomatoes from our garden and I made gingersnaps from scratch. 

Last year we made way too much food, so this year we made half as much and it was just the right amount. Six batches of soup, six loaves of bread, one roaster of applesauce (same amount as last year - a 5gal pail of apples), and four batches of gingersnaps. There were a lot of cookies leftover, but we did that on purpose so we could bring them to the NICU nurses. 

We started cooking around 2pm Thursday after a stop up on the NICU floor to visit our nurses. That timed out very well. Last year we paused cooking to visit and cooking got rushed in the end. This year was much more relaxed even with the extra from scratch item. 

Jaron fell asleep on the way back from the hospital and snoozed in the car seat while we cooked. 

I made the bread and cookies. G bought the groceries and made the soup. One of our favorite house volunteers had signed up to be the scheduled host for us (they always have someone familiar with the kitchen/serving help with the meal). She made the salad and helped get our serving line set up. 

Mimi and Papa showed up just in time to entertain Jaron when he woke up from his nap. He had a blast playing with them outside, in the gym, and in the toy room. 

They also helped serve the meal. 

Here we are, ready to go! 

We served about 65 meals, which was our estimate of how many. Lots of positive feedback on the food. Guess we'll keep it the same for next year. 😉 

Breakfast Cookies

I was super excited about this recipe... Breakfast Cookies! 

I didn't have any sliced almonds, but I did have some chopped walnuts left from a different recipe, so I swapped those. Instead of the craisins, I did a combo of dried mulberries and dried berry mix, which includes pepitas. 

They turned out great. Very hearty, just sweet enough. They hold together well and aren't crumbly.

A perfect filling breakfast before a day of appointments! 

Deodorant

G used to make his own deodorant. He only stopped because it was messy to scoop it out of a container and apply it under the arms. That didn't sound appealing to me either. I wondered if we could reuse our empty deodorant stick containers. 

I tried that in a past experiment. The only way the plastic ones work is if you leave some deodorant in the bottom before any holes appear, otherwise the liquid deodorant runs right out the bottom. 

So we bought deodorant for a while. Then we found some cardboard deodorant tubes from that company. I bet those could be refilled! 

We had some jar deodorant in the bathroom drawer, so today I pulled them out and set them on this ancient heating pad I keep in the craft room. Worked like a charm to melt them! 

We had enough empty deodorant sticks around to fill. 

And voila! Homemade deodorant able to be applied cleanly! 

I wonder if G will notice a difference in the store bought vs ours... 🤔

Freeze Dried Tomatoes

Lots of green tomatoes on the vines, not many red. Certainly not enough to do a batch of canned tomatoes or even a freeze dryer batch. So, I've been cutting them in half and freezing them for later freeze drying. 

The deer have discovered the garden, not that there's much for them to eat. They sampled a tomato and didn't care for it (the green one below). 

I've debated pulling out plants already, but my stubbornness kicked in and I'm going to leave them in for a while longer. Maybe we'll have a mini heat wave and get some more tomatoes and peppers. 😅

Green Beans

I've always loved dilly beans but never made them myself. With all the beans G brought home from the garden center, I figured it was time. 

They're pretty easy to make (recipe from Ball.com). A clove of garlic, tsp of dill in each jar. Cut your beans to 4in, mix up brine. Hot water bath can. Done. 

The recipe suggested adding some red pepper flakes for a bit of a kick. I did that for three of the jars (wide mouth so I'd remember which was which). 

I did one batch of beans in my little pressure canner. 

The rest of the beans ended up blanched for freezing. 

Quest: Banana Muffin #7 (aka #2)

I mean... #2. 🤦‍♀️😅 I had this post all typed out and then I found my original banana muffin notes and realized I had previously baked this recipe. But it still holds as a nice banana muffin, so I'll share the post anyway. 😉

Recipe #7 is from Kristine's kitchen and uses the ingredients you'd expect and maple syrup for sweetener. There's milk in this recipe, which you can sub for other liquids. I did use milk since we have plenty of goat milk around. It only calls for 1/4c, so it's not like I used up a ton. 😅

The most putzy thing for me was melting the butter (since we don't have microwave). It wasn't until I had the muffins in the oven I saw the note you can sub applesauce for the butter. I had just made some applesauce too! 🤦‍♀️ Oh well, next time. 

There was enough batter for one pan of full sized muffins and a little leftover. I put the leftovers in a tiny cake pan and it hardly coated the bottom. 

They turned out nice and moist! I would definitely make this recipe again, doing some Emily tweaks next time. 😉

Goat Milk Ice Cream Take Two!

I borrowed an ice cream maker KitchenAid attachment from a friend of mine so I could continue using up my goat milk. 

The recipe: 

4 cups of milk

1 tablespoon vanilla paste (I used regular vanilla)

1/4-1/2 cup maple syrup (I used 1/4c)

6 egg yolks

Blend everything in a blender and then pour into ice cream maker.

I also added a cup of cream I had skimmed off the top of milk we had collected over the week. 

The ice cream maker is super easy to use: Put the bowl in the freezer 24h ahead of time (she did this so it'd be ready to go for me). Attach the bowl to your mixer, set the dasher inside, attach the converter to the mixer shaft, turn the mixer on the stir setting and dump in your ice cream mix. 

I had trouble getting the converter to attach. My mixer is just a little too new or old for this model of ice cream maker. I was able to get it to work, but the bowl sat out and lost some of its freezing power by the time I got it to work. 

The batch did freeze, but it was pretty soft. I quickly scooped it into an ice cream pail and transferred it to the freezer, but it had begun to melt already. 

I tried another batch of the same recipe after another 24h of freezing the bowl and that one worked much better since I knew how to get the converter attached. 

We haven't tried it yet (aside from licking out the bowl 😜). Once it was at the softserve stage, I put it in the freezer to harden up a bit. 

Cottage Cheese Straining

The first time I tried making cottage cheese was a month before Jaron was born. I had just done the straining portion before the ultrasound that showed my cervix was shortening. The cheese sat out for a few days and lost quality. G still ate it and said it was good, but I stayed away from eating it just in case. 

This time, no medical emergencies! 😅 

The recipe said to use a cheesecloth that had been boiled for 20min. I used the old apple strainer stand to hold the cloth in place while I dumped the curds/whey into the cloth. 

I didn't want flies getting in that she used, so I tried to gather the cheesecloth at the top so I could rubber band it. Unfortunately, one of the sides of the cheesecloth slipped out before I could grab it and all of the curds dumped back into the whey. 🤦‍♀️ 

Try again! 

I was able to salvage some, so I tied that portion in a rubber band and hung it over a bowl. Once I had restrained everything, I carefully tied that bundle together to also hang.

Here's my hanging mechanism: 

The curds hang for 12h. At that point you can add a half a teaspoon of salt per cup of curds and hang it again to take out more moisture, or you can move it to the fridge and eat it as is. My timing resulted in the Kurds being ready to process around bedtime, and I was over messing with them by that point, so I just added salt and stuck it in the fridge. 

Stirring the salt in broke up all the curds, so the consistency is more like a soft cream cheese / sour cream / ricotta cheese. Very pleasant tang! We added some to a beef-tomato crockpot meal I made the other night and it really elevated the dish! 

It's a good thing we like this cottage cheese because I attempted to make yogurt again and the milk split into curds and whey before I could pause it at the yogurt stage. 

What to do with all that whey? I put some of the whey in the beef-tomato crock pot meal. The rest of it is going in the freeze dryer to make whey powder. After our next baby comes, I'll add some of the powder to my favorite protein ball recipe for an extra boost. 

You can use whey as a substitute for liquid in any bread or muffin recipe. I might try that sometime too! We have plenty more whey coming with this next batch of cottage cheese!

Quest: Banana Muffin #6

This recipe came from Scientifically Sweet. 

It calls for room temp eggs. All my eggs were in the fridge, so I did the quick egg warming trick of putting them in a bowl of warm water for a few minutes. 

I didn't have oat flour on hand, so I had to drag out my mill and grind some quick. 

The recipe calls for frozen blueberries, which I didn't have. I left them out and didn't substitute anything for them. This is a quest for banana muffins after all, so they should be able to stand on banana alone. 

They turned out a little dry. I thought they were fine; G wasn't a big fan. I wonder what adding a little applesauce would do...

Freeze Drying Kale, Fermenting Pickles

I recently listened to a homesteading podcast about freeze drying. The interviewee said she loved freeze drying kale and then using it in lasagna as a layer (letting the sauce rehydrate it). Seemed interesting to try, and kale does happen to be growing in our garden. 

It's a pretty quick cycle, just a few hours - not much moisture to take out. 

The hardest part is putting it into jars without it crumbling. 

G brought home a ton of cucumbers, purchased at an Amish produce auction by his boss/coworker. They were a larger size than I typically like to eat, but they weren't bitter. We also happen to be running out of my homemade sliced pickles, so I decided to pickle as many of the cucumbers as I could... 

These pickles are actually made from cucumbers from our garden before the squash bugs destroyed them. 

I tried this recipe first. 

G wasn't a fan of the flavor. So I tried a different recipe from a fermentation cookbook. Actually, two recipes. 

I like them both a lot. G hasn't sampled those yet. I made a gallon of whole pickles, a gallon of spears , and a gallon of slicers. 

There were still cucumbers left, so I made half gallons each of spears, slicers, and pennies of the recipe I know G likes. That one uses vinegar. 

It wasn't until I mixed up the last batch that I realized what I thought was a bottle of vinegar was actually water. 🤦‍♀️ I had saved distilled water in a vinegar bottle to use in our chicken incubator. Ugh! 

Thankfully they had only been in the fridge a few hours and the spices hadn't leeched all their flavor into the liquid. I strained the not-brine out and remixed up the vinegar salt brine. 

It actually was resolved quicker than I thought. The strainer worked perfectly to keep the spices inside. Back into the fridge for pickling. 

A neighbor of ours gave me a gigantic tub of dill (before we got all the cucumbers). I collected quite a bit of it, more than I thought I would use. And it ended up being just enough for all these pickles! 

The same thing happened with coriander, except those were from cilantro plants that had gone to seed in our garden. At the time, I had no clue what I was going to do with it all. I just collected it and tucked it with our spices. And it ended up being just enough for all the pickle recipes!

All together we have five gallons of pickles at our house right now. 😵‍💫 Now I need to remember to eat them! 

We still have some fresh cucumbers lingering in the fridge. I wanted to give them to the chickens and ducks. G says he's going to eat them. As for me, I am pickled and cucumbered out. 😅

Golden Beets

Turns out you're supposed to store beets somewhere humid. I left mine on the counter, so they lost a lot of moisture and got pretty shriveled. I figured you could do the same thing to rehydrate them as you do with cucumbers, and I cut the tops and bottoms off and put them in some ice water in the fridge for a few hours. 

Well, a few hours turned into a few days before I finally got to them. 😅 However they did rehydrate well! 

I steamed them for about half an hour and then rubbed the skins off. It was supposed to be an easy peeling process, but I didn't find it to be easy and quick.

I chopped these small ones up for pressure canning. The gigantic beats will be blanched and cut up for freeze drying. Or shredded for the freezer. 

Here are my four pints of beets about to go in the pressure canner.

I'm left with one mega, semi shriveled beet I'm not sure what to do with. Will it rehydrate? Or is it too big?

Hairy Carrots

My container carrots have long passed their prime. I finally got around to harvesting them today. 

Not a great yield. I think I planted two varieties in the bin- a traditional orange variety and the last of my dragon's blood carrots. The dragon's blood definitely grew better, i.e. larger. 

They also had a ton of side roots. They came out like hairy little gnome beards...

All cleaned up and looking normal. 

I laid them out to cure on a screen in the garage for a few days before I'll transition them to long-term storage. 

 

Goat Milk Tomato Basil Soup

I am not a tomato soup fan but there is one recipe I do enjoy. I've never made it for myself before and I wonder if I wrote down the ingredients incorrectly. 

One cup of tomatoes with two quarts of dairy? Seems a bit imbalanced. As you can see, the soup doesn't look very tomato-y. 

It also got too hot which made the milk curdle. All in all, not the best. I served it to our Japanese students and they actually liked it! 

As a side, I made grilled cheese with the leftover  home milled flour focaccia bread. 

On the second serving of the soup, I used my immersion blender to blend up the soup (chat GPT suggestion), and surprisingly it broke up the curdled milk and made it very creamy. 

The leftovers went into the freezer and sometime in the future I think I'll turn them into a pasta sauce.