Summer is about gone. (8-7-14)

(August 7, 2014) I have not been doing much of anything with the farm this summer. I have a pretty good excuse, as I crashed my bicycle July 13th, got a severe head injury and a broken right collarbone, spent 3 days in the hospital and had to be off work for 3 weeks to recover. As I am right handed the broken bone prevented me from doing much of anything on the farm. Brenda has been helping with feeding the livestock, but there is a very long list of work projects that haven't been done as a result of my disability. Right before the crash the foster kids got adopted out, so we don't have any foster kids right now. We plan to get more in a few weeks, after we get back from a planned vacation.

I got my younger son, Adam, to help butcher one pig before the bike crash, so the meat is in the freezer. Unfortunately, as this is the first time for this, I did not think to pack the meat in ice like I should have. So, the meat was way too warm for way too long in the freezer and now it smells bad. I don't know how much of it is still safe to eat. There is about 300 lb. of meat altogether. Since my injury prevents me from doing any heavy lifting I have not been able to pull it out of the freezer to check on it to see if some of it is going to be edible. Live and learn. The remaining pigs are the Large Black sow and the Hampshire cross boar.

The sow gave birth to seven baby pigs a few weeks ago, but they didn't make it. I think that she just wasn't giving them enough milk to survive. So, hopefully she will have another litter in a few months and she will do better this time.


One pig was white with black spots almost like a Gloucestershire Old Spot.  One was black and white like a Hampshire, and the other two were brown and white.  As mom is a Large Black and dad is Hampshire/Yorkshire half and half, there must be other genes floating around in there somewhere.


The 25 chickens are doing great. About 6 of them are hens and the rest are roosters. They are now big enough to butcher, so as soon as I am cleared by the doctor to start using my right arm again, we will start butchering the roosters. I plan to keep the hens, to replace the ones I have right now. They will be old enough to molt in a few months, so when they stop laying they will be next in line to butcher. We actually started out with 60 chickens but for some reason a bunch of them decided that they didn't need to go inside the hen house at night. Well, it didn't take long for the raccoons and possums and foxes to find out that we had a free buffet line, and they went away. So, the ones we have now are the ones who stayed inside the hen house every night. I guess that even though there is plenty of space for 60 chickens to roost in the hen house, they felt crowded.




This is Brenda's new solar powered clothes dryer.

  So, you ask, how is it going with the solar panels? Well, it is working well, but not perfect. That is, our electric bill last month was $95. On the one hand, it is a very small electric bill considering that the whole house and all the appliances, air conditioning, water heaters, everything is electric. Sure, it would be nice to have an electric bill that was $0, but on the other hand, there was no practical way for me to know how much electricity the house was going to use under normal conditions before it was built. So, the best I could do was to use our electric usage from the previous house as a guesstimate. I could have made the solar panels larger, as there is room for 6 more panels on the roof of the workshop, but that would have been expensive, as the current (no pun intended) setup uses the maximum number of panels for that system. Adding more panels would have required a whole new hookup system, electric meter, monitoring system, and so on. Generally speaking, you want to produce less electricity that you use. The reason is, that the electric company can produce electricity a whole lot cheaper than I can. My electricity is expensive, theirs is cheap. So to produce extra electricity would be a waste of money. The object is to produce just a little bit less than I use, but it is very hard to know exactly how much we use until we have lived in the house for a few years, and we wanted all the contruction done at one time.

No apologies, just more fun

I thought about apologizing for the long wait for the next post, but we will skip that and move on to the good stuff. We are well into early summer now here in Springfield, Missouri. We had some cold weather last week when it got down into the 30s at night and we had some frost on the grass in the morning. Now it is in the 60s at night and well into the 80s during the day. We got the swimming pool up and running a few weeks ago and with the warm weather this week the kids are swimming nearly every evening, which is great. The best thing for a pool is for it to be used nearly every day.

I have it in mind to cut my own hay and put it up in haystacks. Now I don't know anything about haystacks and haying, so this is all a learning experience. I used to have a hay baler but I sold all my haying equipment some years ago thinking I was just going to raise cattle on our land and didn't have enough land for that and for hay, too. But now that we are doing pigs and other small animals I am going back toward haying. So, the plan is to see if I can buy a hay mower and hay rake and then make haystacks instead of bales. That way, they don't have to be stored in a barn and I don't have to have a baler. I am always coming up with ways to spend money on farm equipment. Actually, with the last hay equipment I had, I bought it for about $1,000 and sold it for $2,500, so it turned out okay. (that's probably the last time I will ever make any profit on this farm)

We had some real excitement a few weeks ago when I decided to burn the grass out of the fence line and the fire took off into the field next door. We had to call the fire department and it took them about 3 hours to control it. Actually all they did was to keep it from getting into the yard of the house and keep it from jumping the road. It ended up burning 30 acres. The property owner came over and thanked me for burning off his hay field, as he said it really is good for the grass to be burned off every year. It scared me to death.



Brenda and the kids are watching the fire department trying to control the grass fire.  The neighbors are watching from their pickup truck.  They asked me if I wouldn't mind burning the rest of the field, but I didn't think the firemen would appreciate that.

  I was just thankful the neighbors weren't upset with me for burning their field for them. I made the last meal for the summer on the wood cookstove. The weather was cool, and I had just enough firewood cut for one more meal. I cooked the meal on the stove and baked bread in the oven. The meal was great, but the bread was a bit too wet in the center, probably because I let it get too hot, so the outside was getting too dark before the inside had a chance to cook completely. I will practice some more come cool fall weather.




Two pots on the stove and the bread is rising on top of the warming oven.

 Well, we have another newest member of the family, his name is King but we call him Matthew, as it sounds better.



Matthew enjoying his dinner.

 Matthew is a meth baby, his mother and father are in and out of jail for drugs and other assorted offenses. He is about 6 weeks old now, and is doing very well. As far as we can tell he doesn't have any long term problems from the meth. He will probably be with us for a while, as it normally takes a year or more for legal stuff to be done so that he can be available for adoption. Easter has come and gone, it was nice to have our friends' kids the Zachary family come over and help the little kids coloring Easter eggs on Saturday before Easter.






Most of the color ended up on the eggs.  We did have one spill, but that's not too bad, considering.

 Brenda made lots of devilled eggs for the Easter breakfast at church and lots more over the next few weeks.



It's interesting what a little bit of food coloring and some ordinary vinegar can do.

 My next brainstorm was to buy some baby chicks. Lots of baby chicks. Lots and lots and lots. Like 60 of them. The idea is that we buy chicken at the store almost every week. So, why not just raise them myself? Originally, I thought that the hens would lay eggs, and sit on them, and raise the chicks, and then we would eat them. But I think the hens got wind of this and so they have refused to sit on the eggs. So, we get eggs (we have eggs coming out of our ears) but no chicks. So, I bought 60 chicks from the Cackle Hatchery in Lebanon, which is not too far from here. It really was a good deal, I got 50 rooster chicks for about 50 cents apiece, which was really good, and then I got 10 pullet chicks to replace the hens I have now when they stop laying. The rooster chicks are cheap because most people don't want a bunch of roosters running around, but I plan to kill them all before they start crowing.



This is what 60 baby (one day old) chicks look like.  It was kind of a shock to see how much 60 baby chicks will eat.

My buddy Tyler Zachary came over and helped me build a new chicken house for these chickens, as the old one is full with the 4 hens and a rooster, there would be room for that many chicken in there, anyway. Since these will all be in the freezer long before winter, it didn't need to be weatherproof, nor did it need any insulation. In fact, if anything, it needed lots of good ventilation. So, I got some used barn roofing tin sheets and used that for the sides and roof. I built it on 4x4 skids to make it easier to move around, as I plan to move them down with the pigs when they are big enough.




Lots of "helpers."

  Actually, considering my complete lack of construction skills it turned out very nice. We were able to complete the whole thing with just a little bit left over.






All I can say is, praise to the Lord God for helping me get this all figured out.  Usually with these things I end up having to run to the store for more of one thing or another, sometimes more than one trip.

 We needed to do something with the rest of the venison that we still had in the deep freeze and we were buying a lot of pork sausage, as Brenda is allergic to beef. So, I decided to grind the rest of the venison and use that instead of ground beef or pork sausage. I boned out the rest of the venison we had and ran it through the electric grinder (the new meat saw has a grinder attached to one side). It worked great! I ended up with about 17 lb. of ground venison. We have been using it for meals since then (tacos, lasagna, spaghetti) and it tastes great! I really can't tell the difference from ground beef, but maybe my taste buds are just not very refined.

Packed in one pound portions in zip lock bags and then into the deep freeze.

I let the chicks out into their little pen during the day and then lock them up at night to keep them from being eaten by the wild animals around here. The pen is small enough to protect them from hawks.


It was interesting how big this area was when they first started to go out, and how small it is getting now that the grass is getting beaten down.  I will move them to a new patch of grass soon.

 I built the chicken house with space for the water and feed containers, but I found after a while that it worked much better for the feed and water to be outside, unless it is raining. They don't mess it up as much, and they don't dump it over so much when it is outside.




They have 3 tiers of perches, I don't want to put one perch above another, as they would poop on each other.  I think there's enough room for all 55 of them to roost at night when they get big.  There's 55 because 5 of them didn't survive the first week.

  The plan is to butcher the white female hog this weekend. I haven't weighed them so I really don't know how much she weighs, but I figure probably between 250 and 300 lb., which would yield about 175-200 lb. of pork altogether, including the little bits that make sausage, and the lard for making soap. Even the little bits like ears, tail, pig's feet, everything can be used for something. I have saved some wood ashes from the stove and fireplace to make lye for making soap.




My boar pig.  He has Hampshire markings, but he is half Hampshire and half Yorkshire.  The plan is to breed him with the Large Black sow.

 It's hard to believe that last September they were so small you could hold one in your two hands.

Bottle babies, one week old, last September.




Automatic garbage disposals.  Last November. about 60 lb.

 

Feed, lots and lots of feed. I can tell you, it doesn't save us any money, but I do enjoy taking care of them.





Pork. Pork chops, pork tenderloin, pork shoulder, pork sausage, ham, bacon, ribs, yum!



Winter hangs on

For just one week there, we had a breath, just a breath of coming spring, and then, BANG right back to winter. Ouch! It almost hurt more to have a tease of warm days and then back to very cold again.  But, at least the warm weather thawed out the ground enough so I could get some dirt moved into what will some day be my vegetable garden.



This is Brenda with little Deja

  Well, this is a bit of fresh air! This is little Deja, she is a foster child we had for one weekend. She came to us from the hospital, she was 3 days old, and she stayed with us until they were able to arrange for another foster family to care for her and her big brother.



Eggs!  It's fascinating to see all the different colors.

 We have started getting four eggs a day. It's amazing that we have been getting only one or two eggs a day for several months, even when we had 8 hens. Now, in the middle of winter, they have decided to start laying. Who knows the mind of a chicken? Maybe this is a sign of coming spring. I am hoping that at least one of the hens will decide that it is time for her to raise a family. I have four different breeds of hens, Rhode Island Red, Barred Plymouth Rock, Buff Orpington, and an Americauna. The rooster is a black sex linked breed (whatever that is).




Oatmeal pancakes.  If you have never eaten oatmeal pancakes, then you will just have to give it a try.  It's a bit of work to put together, but it's definitely worth the effort.

 Here's the recipe for oatmeal pancakes:
1 cup oat flour (I grind my own, but you can get it at the store)
4 cups milk (divided)
1 cup of one minute oatmeal
2 eggs
2 Tbsp sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbsp vegetable oil
Here's how I do it. First, I heat the milk in the microwave until it's almost boiling, then I put it in a pan on the stove, add the one minute oats and stir constantly with a wire whisk, because that keeps the milk from burning on the bottom of the pan. Then, when it starts to boil, I turn the heat off but leave it on the stove to keep cooking while I mix the other ingredients. Next put the oat flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl and mix, then add eggs and oil and mix. Then, add the cooked oatmeal and then add about another 2-3 cups of milk and mix thoroughly until it is the desired consistency. I like it a little bit runny so that it cooks quickly all the way through, othewise it can be a bit wet in the center when the outside is cooked.

My mother taught me to test the griddle with a drop of cold water. When it is hot enough so the water drop dances around the griddle in little tiny balls, it is hot enough for pancakes.




The three not-so-little pigs.  In my opinion they  aren't pigs any more, they are hogs.





The time is drawing nigh for the next pig to make its way to the deep freezer. They are eating me out of house and home. It's time to cut my expenses. I had a friend's 14 year old son over a couple weeks ago who likes to work with me with the farm work and I was joking with him about the pigs. You know, they eat like pigs, they are making pigs of themselves, the big one is hogging the feeder, their pasture is like a pig sty, things like that. One advantage of the cold weather, their pasture doesn't smell bad when it's below freezing.

Mixed berry pie.  Long story.

Sunday we had a sort of ice and snow storm so church was cancelled.  So, I was stuck at home with a wood burning cookstove, a pile of firewood and a burning desire to cook something.  So, as I had one frozen pie crust and a bag of frozen mixed berries (straw, rasp, blue) I saw a mixed berry pie coming.  One problem, though.  Only one crust for a two-crust pie.  That meant (NOOOOO) I would have to make the other crust from scratch.  Well, long story short, I did actually get a pie crust on the pie (as you can see) on the third try.  I rolled it out as thin as I could, as I knew it was going to tough.  But, at least it tastes good, and that is half the battle.

Bean soup.

Wood cookstove project #2, bean soup.  I had cooked some ribs last week and saved the broth, and I wanted to make soup, so, one pound of dry beans (mixed beans) a bay leaf, one can of diced tomatoes, some dried minced onions, a dash of garlic powder, and about 4 cups of pork ribs broth.  Heat to boiling, then simmer on a wood stove all day, and even the little kids ate the whole thing!  I did have to add hot water to it from time to time when it got boiled down too much, but, wow! Yes!  I have hot water right there on the stove top!

Leftovers.  Oatmeal raisin cookies and Denver omelet scramble (from Taste of Home).

Wood stove project #3, oatmeal cookies, from my Betty Crocker looseleaf cookbook.  Even a bit too brown on the edges, they went fast!
Wood stove project #4, Denver Omelet Scramble.  I used my 12 inch cast iron frying pan, fried the potatoes, onions and green bell pepper first, then, when the potatoes were starting to brown I added the ham and eggs and baked it in the oven for about 20 minutes.  I know this isn't a surprise to those of you who use cast iron fry pans regularly but it still amazes me when something like this comes right out of the pan, just like Teflon!

The overflow.  I couldn't get all the berry mix in the pie, so I just cooked the rest in the oven and we had it with ice cream.  Yum!  The cookie sheet has the edges off of the pie crust, like my mother used to make, with sugar and cinnamon sprinkled on it.

Breakfast was oatmeal pancakes.  For lunch, Denver Omelet Scramble with oatmeal cookies for dessert.  Supper was bean soup and berry pie and ice cream for dessert.  Plus, it kept the whole house nice and toasty warm all day!  Who wouldn't want a wood cookstove in their house?

After a long, hard day of cooking for me I gave the Glenwood a good scrubbing all over with some steel wool and got most of the grease spots off.

Christmas and New Years Holidays

Christmas was a great time, lots of family here, lots of driving.


Santa's little elves getting ready on Christmas Eve.  Brenda on the left wrapping presents, Lydia on the right, resting up for the big day.

 We enjoyed having the foster kids for Christmas, it's fun to watch little kids opening presents, but it's also wonderful to have our own kids around.



The little ones putting their Christmas bean bag chairs to use on Christmas morning.

 Lydia was home from college, so we were able to spend some time together. Abby and her husband were able to come home for a few days from New Hampshire, which was really nice. We were able to drive to Kansas City for a day to spend with Grandma and Grandpa Barclift, along with the Kansas City crew, Joseph and Miranda, and Andrew and Renae. New Year's was a nice relaxing day at home, and then time at the pastor's house with church family for the evening. We butchered one of the pigs for Christmas eats. A friend of Brenda's from work has a boyfriend who has done this before, so he was gracious enough to agree to walk me through the process, and he brought a pig of his own so we kind of did this together, him on his pig and me on mine. He shot his the day before, so it was already kind of halfway done. I picked the littlest one, as I figured since he was the runt of the litter he would never grow much, anyway.



I know it doesn't look like much, but this is going to be what is known in old-time cookery as "head cheese."

 After cooking it on the wood stove all day, I picked off all the meat, mixed it with spices and chopped it up very small, then packed it tight in a Tupperware bowl and put it in the fridge to cool. The next day I popped it out of the bowl, and there you are! Head cheese. I guess it's kind of like balogna, only that would be processed very fine, more like paste.

Getting ready to have a yummy head cheese sandwich.

We had a "ham" for Christmas dinner, only instead of it being cured and smoked like real ham, it was more like ordinary pork roast, cooked in the wood stove.

I found the recipe for "fresh ham" online.  It was really good!

Well, I have experienced a shift in my hobby interests. For some years I have had an old car, actually two old cars. I had in mind to get them all fixed up, but time and money were not in my favor, so they just sat for years. Well, Brenda and I were on a wedding anniversary trip for a weekend and I saw a sailboat for sale. I have always wanted a "real" sailboat. You know, with a jib and a spinnaker, and a cabin down below so that you can sleep down there and all that, and the price was very attractive, so I made a deal. I am getting rid of the old cars and I bought a boat. Now, I must admit that I have never been on a big sailboat before, even though I have sailed for many years, it was always in very small boats with a lateen sail. The one I have been using is big enough for one person only, and you have to duck when you tack or the boom will knock you over the side.



Santana 21, made by W.D. Schock sailboat company.  They are still in business, still make sailboats of this size.

 This boat is a 21 foot Santana. It was made in 1976, which goes along with all the other old clunky stuff we have around the farm. The great part about it is that it is all there, ready to sail. All the ropes, sails, mast, everything. The wood in the cabin is old and rotting but still serviceable. I have been buying and reading about every book on old sailboats and sailing that I can find, trying to figure out how the thing works. It is fiberglass, so I don't have to worry about the hull rotting. One of the previous owners apparently saw that there was a lot of rainwater accumulating in the bilge, so they thoughtfully drilled a hole in the bottom to let the water out! Wow! What a great idea! Now when I go sailing I don't have to worry about getting water in the boat! Well, anyway, there is that one thing that will have to be done before I go sailing for the first time. The nice thing is that it is small enough to pull behind the car, but large enough to actually spend the night if I want to. There's no kitchen or bathroom, but it's okay for picnics close to shore. Brenda has a friend at work that has a sailboat and she and her husband sail to the Bahamas every year, so they are going to come over and show me how the thing works. It was apparently used a lot for racing in the past, as it has a lot of very expensive hardware on the deck that was used for handling the sails.

I figured out a couple things with the wood stove. One, it really does help to get something hot quick, like the pancake griddle, or even just the big frying pan, to remove the lid and set the pan directly over the fire. I know this sounds obvious now, but I always thought the lids were there for a reason. I guess really it's the holes that are there for a reason. The other thing is, I always have had trouble finding sticks of the right size for the fire. I have to dig way down in the wood box to find the one I want. I finally realized that if I just stand them on end, it is immediately apparent how big they are, which makes it much easier to pick the one I want.



You can't get as many sticks in there going up and down, but at least you can see what's there.



Thanksgiving week

Well, a lot of water has gone under the bridge since I last updated this blog, so bear with me. I have several items to talk about today. First, I finally did get some photos to share, I didn't want to write another update until I had some pictures, I hate reading blogs when there aren't any pictures. The pigs are growing fast. I haven't weighed them, but I am pretty sure they are well over 100 lb by now.




I now have four pigs as I bought a Large Black hog, female, a few weeks ago for breeding with the black and white boar. I understand that it is better to wait until she gets full size before allowing her to breed, but I don't think I will be able to do that, as that involves building a completely separate enclosure complete with housing, feeder, waterer and electric fence just for him, so I guess she will just have to deal with it as it comes.

Here they are at the feeder I built.  I don't talk to them any more, as they will shortly be invited to dinner.  You can see the insulators for the electric fence I installed a few weeks ago.  That has saved me from lots of anxiety as the pigs figured out how easy it is to get out.  The electric fence has convinced them that they don't want to try.

  





This is what they looked like just a few weeks ago.

 The chickens are doing okay, but I am still only getting one or two eggs per day. I finally did decide to butcher one of the roosters on Saturday, as my sons were home for the weekend, so they helped me catch one of the black ones, and I had the opportunity to learn by doing, as I have not done this before. I read about the technique in my Storey's guide to chickens, but this was the first time I have done it, and I have not seen it done before.




Here's the black rooster head down in the "Cone of Death."

  I had purchased a "Chicken executor" at a flea market last summer, so now is my chance to try it out. The rooster was upside down in the cone, and his head is supposed to be sticking out the bottom.




As you can see, his head is not sticking out the bottom of the cone, like it is supposed to.  He had pulled his head up inside the cone.  All I see is rooster comb.

  So, I ended up having to reach up inside the cone and grabbing his head and pulling it down and out of the cone in order to do the job. I will refrain from going into gory detail at this point, but let's just say that the rooster lost a lot of blood and then he was dead. The next job was the plucking. I had put a big pot of water on the stove to boil, so I got the water, as it was nearly boiling, and dumped it into a big enamel bucket, hoping that there would be enough room for the whole rooster, less his head, as that was gone now. After a bit of swishing around and turning over a couple times, the feathers started to come loose. Now, I had forgotten some of the instructions from Storey's guide, so we left the rooster in the water as we plucked, which was a mistake, as he got partially cooked, but at least all the feathers came off.



The rooster is being undressed, so to speak.

 I did have enough presence of mind to take it out of the hot water partway through the plucking process, so it didn't get boiled completely, but it did get pretty stiff. Once the plucking was done, came the gutting. It did turn out to be a bit of a struggle to get inside the bird, but once I was in there everything came out pretty well. I ended up removing the neck, as I needed to get the crop and upper parts out. All the inedible parts went over the back fence, along with the feet and feathers. What was left looked pretty close to what you see in the grocery store. I weighed the chicken on the kitchen scale, and it weighed about 5 and 3/4 lb. So, a good-size family chicken for dinner.



The Mighty Hunters, having captured and killed the dangerous and wily chicken.  Me, on the left, and my youngest son, Adam, on the right.  He is the only one who is brave enough to help out with this stuff.  He is also the one who helped me castrate the pig last time he was home.

 On to Thanksgiving dinner! I wanted to cook the turkey in the wood cook stove this year, as this is the first year in the new house, so I put the turkey in an oven bag so that it would stay nice and moist, and popped it in the oven. It was supposed to cook 4 1/2 hours at 325 degrees, so I got it in the oven at about 8:30 a.m. with the idea of being ready for dinner by about 1 p.m. We had waffles from the wood stove for breakfast, so that helped to get the oven hot.



Lots of oil is the key here.  Spray vegetable oil on the hot waffle iron and about 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil in the waffle mix.  I learned from last time that one scoop (ladle full) of batter is enough to fill the iron.  The first attempt ended quickly when the batter ran over the sides and onto the stove.  When it is smoking hot on both sides, it's ready.  I removed the stove lid under the waffle iron in order for it to get hot enough, so it is directly over the flames.



Since the turkey was in the wood stove oven, I used the electric stove oven to cook the pies. I made home made apple pie, pecan pie and pumpkin pie. The pumpkin was from last year, as we did not use it all last year, and I could not in good conscience throw it out. It was in the deep freezer, and still good. I thawed it out and then put it in a cotton bag (one of my t-shirts) and hung it up to drain. I got this idea from my friend, Jim, on his "Wood Cookstove Cooking" blog about how to get tomato pulp to get thick enough without cooking it down on the stove. After a day or two of draining, it was thick enough to use for pie and pumpkin cake without having to cook it down. What a great idea!



The pumpkin pie and the pecan pie are cooling, the apple pie was next in the electric oven.  I also had made a cherry pie, but it really doesn't count, as that came from a can.  I did humble myself and used frozen pie crust.  I know, it isn't as good, but then it sure was easy.  With everything else going on, it made all these pies possible.



Before.




After.

 

The oven bag was burned away on the left side, over the turkey's crop area, as that was the side closest to the firebox. That didn't matter, as there wasn't anything on that side to eat, anyway. It was done just right, the meat was nice and moist, and we had plenty of juices left for gravy.




We all had a wonderful dinner together for Thanksgiving.  Thanks be to God, who always leads us to triumph.  Praise the Lord for his many blessings, and for all the wonderful people we have in our family!  We had our two college kids home on Thursday and two of our older kids with their spouses on Saturday.  Brenda's mom was able to be with us from Thursday through Saturday.

 

First full week of cooking on the wood stove

Now that the weather has cooled off I have been doing all the cooking on the wood cook stove. One meal was fried chicken with fried potatoes and vegetables.


Fried chicken on a wood stove.  It doesn't get any better than this!  I got the chicken fryer at an antique mall.  Unfortunately, I have not gotten any family heirloom cookware.  The two teapots are purchases, the tall one from a flea market, and the shiny 2 gallon job online.

 I actually fried the chicken the day before, as I had the chicken all thawed and ready to go, but didn't have time to do a whole meal that day, so I went ahead and fried the chicken that day (Tuesday) and then fried the potatoes and warmed the vegetables in the microwave (shudder).

The chicken was fried the day before, so it got warmed up in the microwave, and now it is sitting on its little warming trivet on the stove backsplash while the potatoes are frying.  The vegetables were warmed in the microwave, and they are just sitting there keeping warm while the potatoes finish frying.

Notice that I removed the lid and put my frier pot directly over the fire to get it hot and keep it hot while the potatoes were frying. The next meal we had on Thursday was baked cod, in the oven, and rice cooked on the stove top, and canned vegetables that I heated up on the stove top. I was pretty nervous about using my good Farberware aluminum bottomed pan on the wood stove, but it worked just fine, I think the only serious concern would be if the pan boiled completely dry, so I made sure it didn't. I had trouble getting the water to boil for the rice, (a watched pot never boils), so I had to keep adding water as it was evaporating faster than it was boiling. It finally did boil enough to put the rice in, but I think it was about an hour before it did boil. I think that if I had built a quick hot fire with small sticks instead of the big chunks I was using, it would have boiled a lot faster. Next time.

Well, here's the meal.

It was very good.  The only real problem was that it took way too long to prepare. The next meal, Friday, was homemade pizza. I made up the dough in the automatic electric breadmaker, as it works great and I can do other work while it is mixing and kneading, although I do enjoy making my own bread from scratch from time to time. First, I cooked the pork sausage. Then when the oven got up to about 350 degrees I baked the crust first. That way it isn't soggy in the middle from the toppings, and it bakes faster. I learned from a food fair many years ago that if you flip the crust over it's a lot easier to put toppings on. The bottom of the crust is flat. You have to try it. It works!



This is an easy pizza.  Pork sausage, mushrooms, tomato paste, diced canned tomatoes, mozzarella, cheddar cheese.  Baked for about 15 minutes at about 350-400.  I turned it around about halfway so that it wouldn't be burnt on one end and raw on the other end.  The edges got a little dark, but it was still very good!

 On Saturday I made bacon and scrambled eggs for breakfast. I spent some time and burned a lot of energy cutting more wood out back. There's a really big red oak tree downed by the back fence that I have been wanting to cut, so I worked on that for a couple hours until I got the chainsaw into some rocks and ruined the chain. Once you burn the chain on a rock, sharpening it with the file doesn't help. I have another chain for it down in the bottom of the truck toolbox, so I will have to dig it out and switch chains. It's fairly new, as I sharpened it only a couple times, and it started cutting sideways on me so I bought a new chain. Later I learned that this can be corrected simply by sharpening more on the opposite side. I cut some of the sections of oak short so they would be easier to split. I got a little electric wood splitter last year, it actually works! I never could get my great big hydraulic wood splitter to work, so it is just sitting out by the back fence. It is supposed to run on the tractor hydraulics, but my tractor doesn't have integral hydraulics. It has a hydraulic pump that goes on the PTO shaft, but that doesn't work very well with the wood splitter. So, I split a couple of sections of the oak, but it sure was hard to split. I think it is as tough and stringy as elm. Some of the pieces I had to finish off with the axe. But at least now I have enough small split pieces so I can get the stove hot fast. The bigger round stuff is good for keeping the oven hot once it gets hot. The damper is a slide in the back of the stove that slides over and partly closes the opening to the flue pipe. It works great when the stove is cold, but once it gets hot the iron expands and it sticks, so I have a little hammer that I use to open and close the damper when the stove is hot. I am sincerely hoping and praying that my banging on it doesn't break the iron! Maybe it would be better to use a piece of wood in between to absorb some of the shock from the hammer. Hmmm. The pigs finished off the two bags of feed I bought for them three weeks ago, so Saturday I bought four more bags. It filled the pig feeder to the top with some left over. I also refilled the 55 gallon drum I have for the pig's water. So that should keep them fed and watered for a while. I am still only getting 2 eggs a day. I think some of my hens are holding out on me. I will have to follow them around and see if I can figure out where they are hiding their eggs.

Baking with the cookstove

Saturday was cold, wet and rainy, so after finishing paying bills on the computer I decided to give the cookstove a try at baking. I got a box of brownie mix, as I figured that would allow me a rather wide margin of error. I got the fire started and then after about 30 minutes the oven was not getting hot, so I packed the firebox with wood and went out to get another egg from the hen house. When I got back the smoke alarms were going off, the upstairs was filling with smoke, and the oven temp was up over 450 degrees. I finished mixing the egg into the brownie mix, figuring that the oven would start cooling down some, but it didn't. So, I opened the "check draft" on the front of the firebox and when that didn't seem to do anything to the oven temp, I went ahead and put the brownie mix into the oven. When I opened the oven door, smoke billowed out into the room. I guess when I fired up the stove the first time, I didn't get the oven part hot enough to burn off the blacking, so now it was burning off. I opened all the windows and doors upstairs to let the smoke out of the house, it didn't really get cold inside because the stove was giving off so much heat. The brownie mix was supposed to bake for about 23 minutes but after 15 minutes it was browning quite dark, so I took it out and put it on a rack to cool. I let the fire burn out over the next 2-3 hours and I recorded the temperature inside the oven with a store-bought oven thermometer and the temperature that read on the front of the oven to see how close they were, and wrote it on a post-it note so that in the future I will have a better idea what the oven temp is without having to open the oven door.

You probably cannot see the temp gauge on the oven door, but it was reading well over 450 degrees.  If I had had some presence of mind, or if my wife was at home she would have suggested that I leave the oven door open for a while until the temperature dropped down to the desired temp of 375 degrees.  But if my wife were at home I wouldn't have been doing this, anyway.

So I taped the temperature conversion chart I had made to the back of one of the cabinet doors so that next time I do some baking I can see what the actual temperature is in the oven.

You can see that the back left is dark, that is the side closest to the rear of the firebox.  It probably would have been more evenly browned if I had remembered to rotate the pan halfway through the baking.

Anyways, I was very pleased that I could get the oven that hot with only fairly small sticks of wood. I was just using some pieces of junk wood that I had piled out by the back fence. In the future, at least during the winter, I plan to use regular firewood (oak, maple and walnut). I still have lots of small trees that were taken out when they made the driveway through the woods, plus several large trees that are down out by the back fence that need to be cleared. I think I have enough down trees right now to keep me in firewood for several years before I need to start cutting live trees.

Here come the pigs!  They always come running when I go out there, to see if I have anything good for them to eat.  Their dogloo is back under the trees on the right.  Most of the chickens stay in the pen, although the Americaunas manage to get out and back in again every day.

I have some barn metal that I plan to use to make a larger shelter for the pigs, as they will outgrow their dogloo pretty quick. I would guess that they weighed about 5 pounds each when I got them the 10th of September. Right now they are probably about 10-15 pounds each. They have gone through one 50 lb. bag of feed and are well into the second 50 lb. I built a pig feeder for them last week modeled after the one I saw in the store. It probably will hold about 300 lb. of feed, so that should be big enough to feed them when they get big. The plan is to castrate the white boar pig, and raise him and the female for eating, and get a large black for breeding. I figure the cross between the black and white pig I have, and the Large Black pig will give me good growth and hybrid vigor. We shall see.