With all of this space out back, keeping the weeds down was a real hassle. Junior’s worked hard on getting the soil leveled so it would be easier to run the mower over but it’s still a big chunk. So while we were putting up fences for the chicken yard, we figured we’d put up one more fence for a little livestock.

Sheep are my meat animals of choice right now. I thought they’d be easier to start with than a steer, as the pen’s not all that big. They’re better about grazing grass than a goat, who’ll go for your landscaping if you give it half a chance. And lamb is my very favorite meat.

Growing our own meat (the lambs and the chickens too) goes along well with the big garden. I’ve always wanted to grow more of my own food. If I had a bigger place I’d get even more ambitious, but this is a good start. I like knowing what goes into what goes into me, and I like giving the kids an education in where their food comes from. With all the hunting we do, these kids aren’t under the misconception that meat comes in a plastic package from the grocery store, but this will be even more personal. This is meat that we directly had a hand in growing. We’re taking full responsibility that in order to feed us, we’ll have to kill things. We’ll do it cleanly and with respect, but these are by no means pets, and I’ll be reminding the kids of that every chance I get. They do not get names.

So once we decided to try this, I started asking around for lambs to buy. One lamb would be miserable and lonely, but two are fine. I would have liked three, but two is what I found. I’m not ready to mix lambs from different flocks yet; I want to keep my diseases under control here. I haven’t touched sheep for twenty years, since college, but I still remember some things.

The producer I found was recommended by a local friend. I knew him too, but I didn’t know he had sheep. He’s a rancher and farmer and happens to have a few ewes that he’s accumulated over the years. Only two lambs weren’t spoken for, and he gave me a really good price on them, and lots of good advice. We went and picked them up with the dog crate on Monday, and if I’d waited even another week, I’d have had to take two trips. They’re much bigger than they’d been the week before when I scoped them out.

I was worried that the dogs would run these things to death through the fence. They’re Border Collies, after all. Chasing sheep is what they’re bred to do, and Ringo is a known livestock worrier, which is part of the reason that I have him. Since my training collar was dead and only had one receiver unit anyway, I took the opportunity to buy a pro trainer model, with two collars. I got the set just in time and reminded the dogs what that collar means. They know; they behave perfectly well with the collars on.

Still, I was a little leery when I turned the lambs out in their pen. Ringo was nowhere to be seen; he sulks when the collar’s on even if he hasn’t felt it in days. Angus was intrigued though, paying close attention right at the gate but not getting excited or trying to chase. We stood out there and watched the lambs explore their new surroundings for a while and I was very surprised to see them march right up to the gate. They sniffed noses with Angus and then walked away; all was well. He remains interested and likes to lay near their fence but I haven’t caught him trying to chase one time. Good dog.

So they’ll be an interesting project. There will be challenges along the way, no doubt, but I think it’ll be rewarding. Certainly the end result will be, which we should reach around the end of June. Tasty, tasty lamb in my freezer, mmm!

Last week, Seamus was bugging me to make grape jelly. I’ve been on a jelly-and jam-making tear lately anyway, so what was one more round? I didn’t think there were enough ripe grapes on the vines, but I sent him out anyway to check.

He came back with half a bushel, more than enough. We don’t know what kind of grapes they are; they’re certainly not the traditional purple jelly grapes, but I figured they would work anyway.

It took us two days. On the first day, we picked each grape off the stem and filled a gallon-sized pot with them. We added a little water and cooked and crushed them down to extract the goodness. After that, we ran them first through the food mill and then let them hang in cheesecloth overnight to get good clear juice for jelly. Seamus did much of this work.

The next afternoon, we started in again. We cooked the juice with the sugar and pectin, and prepared everything for canning. Seamus did some of the canning himself even, being very careful with the hot stuff. He’s a little too short to safely reach into the canner, so I did that part.

The end result was nine jars of a pretty pink jelly.  After a week, it’s already fully jelled. We whipped up some biscuits for breakfast on Saturday morning and tasted it – fantastic stuff! I know what he’s going to be packing for lunch come fall, and good for him!

It’s still really new to me to share life with someone that I can share lots of different activities with too. The hunting is easy enough; plenty of men are into that. But the gardening and food preservation that I’ve always dabbled in, I’ve dabbled alone.

Not any more though. Junior was right on board with making the garden, even if it started out as my project that he was helping me get started. At this point it’s both our project; he’s enjoying it every bit as much as I am. He gets out there and weeds and checks every little plant for signs of vegetables popping out. When his peppers started growing little micro-jalapenos, he was the proud papa.

It did surprise me to find him developing an interest in food preservation. He started pretty traditionally, wanting to make deer jerky. Since he gave me a smoker for Christmas, we cured some meat and gave it a shot. Come to think of it, I don’t think I got to taste much of that first batch of jerky. I think it all went to work with him to share. That led to a kitchen purchase, the electric slicer, and my realization that two people in a hobby do nothing but feed off each other in the purchasing department. That can be hard on the checkbook, but at least we’re acquiring some of the machines that I’ve wanted for a while.

The next logical step was to try to make snack sticks from venison. We do have a lot of venison and it’s so expensive to have the butcher make them, but they’re always the first things to get gobbled up. I already had a meat grinder as part of my KitchenAid, so we defrosted a little bit of meat, per the recipe on the sausage spice pack we got, and added some pork roast to it. Deer meat is really dry; the fat tastes about terrible, so we trim it very lean when we initially process it. Pork fat is added back in to give some body and moisture. Since we’re on diets, we stuck with whole pork, not just the fat.

We had a good old time stuffing these things. I’d bought the stuffer attachment and some casings for myself for Christmas in 2007, and hadn’t got to using them yet. They went on really well, and then into the smoker they went, to cook slowly for six or eight hours. We had some lessons learned in this batch, but we’ll try it again and continue tweaking as we go. This also gave us incentive to finally get that vacuum sealer that really makes a lot of sense when you’ve got a lot of meat to process.

Since I was online buying a meat slicer anyway, I added to my cart a giant pressure canner that I’ve always wanted. I’ve done a little canning but only with a water bath – pickles and jams. I’d love to try pressure canning, like you need for low-acid vegetables, meats, and fish. Since we live in one of the most productive agriculture areas in the country, we could probably be preserving something local about every weekend. For now, we’ll start with the easier, safer stuff, and work our way up into the more complicated.

This weekend, it was pickled asparagus. I don’t have an asparagus plot yet. If I did plant one this year, it wouldn’t be producing enough to set aside for a long time, considering how much I adore fresh grilled asparagus. So we bought about nine pounds at Costco; it’s California-grown and a really good quality. I’ve been buying two to four pounds a week there anyway.

Junior’s not a vinegar fan, so he did the cutting of the vegetables and peppers to spice things up while I made the brine. We didn’t need to use the pressure canner – any old big pot would have done the job – but we broke it in anyway. It works just fine for water-bath canning. We learned the lesson that for things not under pressure, we might as well set up a table outside and use the turkey fryer and gas grill burners, and keep the heat out of the house while heating the water faster.

We did it in two batches, producing less than I would have thought from that giant pile of asparagus spears. But at the moment we have about seven quarts sealed and cooling on the counter and we’re very pleased with ourselves. We’d thought about wokring with strawberry jam while we were at it today, but the fruitstand was closed. It’s just as well; that canning is more work than it seems reading through the recipe. It’ll just take practice; I hope by the end of the summer that we’ll be old hats at it. Maybe we can even justify that tuna fishing trip that I’m jonesing for. Home-canned tuna is to die for.

Junior kept asking me if I wanted my Christmas gift early. I kept telling him no, Christmas would be fine. We’d already got his, and I thought he wanted to make it even.

Turns out, it was big and he didn’t want to wrap it. So when we stopped by his folks’  house, he made me cover my eyes and dragged it down the hall.  It was an electric smoker, the exact model I’d oogled at Bass Pro Shops a couple of weeks before. Good thing too, as he’d already bought it when we went there. I’ve wanted a smoker for a long time, one that’s easier to use than the vertical charcoal models. He has one of those, but we’ve had the damnedest time keeping the temperature steady in that one.

Besides the smoker, his dad had a gift for me of a bag of trout fillets that he’d caught for me. It was the perfect gift, really.  A bag of fish may not suit everyone, but it suits me just fine.

Last night, I marinated the fish and this morning, we seasoned the smoker. Just before lunchtime, I set the fish on the grates and Junior set the timer. I put the wood chips in and set a bowl of some more out there with it, although I never needed the extras.

Three hours later, it smelled delicious and the fish was smokey-brown. I pulled them out and sealed the extras up to freeze for later. Five bags of smoked trout are too much for one sitting.

Since Junior was gone to work, I had myself a light supper of smoked trout and cream cheese on crackers. Delicious!

Now I’m all jazzed up about smoking everything that will hold still for it. Ribs, brisket, jerky, tri tip. The dogs better keep out of the way too; if they hold still, they’d be delicious too.

My family’s never been big on insisting that Christmas be held on the actual day, which came in real handy when I got divorced and swapped which holidays I got every year. We figure it just spreads out the fun, and have been known to have it on the fourteenth just for convenience’s sake. Since the boys were going out of state with their father this year, I wanted to have it on the weekend before. Since Junior’s Grandma seemed to be getting tired of hosting Christmas and Thanskgiving herself every year, we combined the two and invited both families over this Saturday, so I only had to cook one feast.

And feast we did; I cooked to my heart’s content. The men went outside and deep-fried a turkey (which needs more practice, as it was really dry) while I worked the kitchen and tried not to get twitchy when people wanted to help. I’ve got a little family quirk, you see. We women don’t like to let other people in our kitchens. As big as it is, I was using all of it. So Junior’s mom brought her delicious ham and I did a prime rib in the rotisserie, and somehow we got everything to the table at more-or-less the same time. Except for the deviled eggs, but at least I did remember them mid-meal.

Their family traditions have been fairly consistent over the years. Grandma cooks, and I think usually the same things every year. I like to shake things up a little bit, and added in some of our family traditions too. They were polite and tried the Brussels Sprouts, but I don’t think most of them liked them. That’s OK, there were plenty of other vegetables to pick from.

It was a little weird having two tables, plus the kids’ table, but none of the rooms are big enough for eighteen people. It didn’t matter; it was just fun. Our families seem to like each other, and everyone hung out late enough for pie and coffee. My twitchy self managed to get out of the way when some of the women swooped in on the mess and did dishes – I’m usually the one in that role, but I could get used to it!

I think this is probably what we’ll do every year, which gives me a nice excuse to pick up a couple more serving dishes and maybe a tablecloth or two. Nobody noticed that the one I used was an old sheet. It was in a set of tablecloths that my Grandma had given me, and I assumed it was one too, until Seamus and I tried to spread it on the table and discovered that it may have actually been a homemade sleeping bag liner. Oh well, I shrugged and used it anyway, but next year, a real one is in order. I had a nice time using some of my treasured dishes, mixed with paper plates to make cleanup easier. I really do like to cook for lots of people, and this house has the room for it, so I’m happy to take the job, especially with a husband who fully pitches in.

The new kitchen won’t entirely feel comfortable until I do some serious cooking in it. I don’t have a lot of time for that, what with being gone every weekend, but I can squeak a little in here and there. So when the local paper had a recipe for homemade marshmallows in the food section, something I’ve always wanted to try, I went for it.

I do make candy every year, so it wasn’t that foreign to me. The first part is a standard candy-making procedure, melting sugar on the stovetop. No pictures of this phase, as there’s no way to hold the pan, stir, and click without the tripod, which is in the mountains.

 

But once it hit the ideal temperature, into the mixer it went. Man, I love this mixer. It took half as long as the recipe said to fluff it up to the consistency of marshmallow fluff.

Then I spread it out into the pan, sprinkled with powdered sugar to keep it from sticking. I couldn’t keep the sugar up on the sides of the pan and I paid for it the next day, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.

I let it dry for almost 24 hours and then pried it out and cut it into squares. I dusted the edges with more powdered sugar and ziplocked them with lots more to keep them from sticking together too much.

I hauled them out around the campfire and we made S’mores with a couple. They are more tender and flavored a little more strongly than the commercial variety, but it’s not terribly different. They melt much better, but all in all, I spent an hour and several bucks on something that costs about $1.39 at the grocery store. It wasn’t about the price though; it was about having fun in my new kitchen. They certainly served that purpose.

I forgot to bring the leftovers home; we’ll see if they go stale as fast as storebought marshmallows.

If we didn’t fail this course, we didn’t do so awful well either. I give us a generous C+.

It started out fine. I had an overly-optimistic plan, as usual. Remember the Great Meat Jello-Mold fiasco of 2007? Junior, who hasn’t yet exactly learned how I am with overly-optimistic plans, thought he’d help me out with it. I’ve always wanted to learn to smoke, and rolling a turkey up into a big fat doobie just isn’t practical, so he brought over his bullet-style smoker. I picked up some mesquite charcoal and applewood chips, and had every intention of having smoked turkey for dinner.

 

Like any good rednecks living in town, we did this little piece of performance art in the driveway. The neighbors were delighted. But hey, the dogs would have knocked it over in the backyard, and where better to sit with a beer and watch grass grow all day?

Oh, and did I mention that, even though he owned the smoker, he didn’t know how to use it either? So we were both going in cold, with some instructions for a similar model that I’d swiped off the internet. We had to figure out a lot as we went. That is what I do. It’s driving by the seat of my pants, only in the kitchen. Or in this case, the front yard, because I am classy like that.

 

One of the lessons that took us all day to master was getting the temperature right. We started off with a bang, and let the coals get good and going before we put the turkey in, but then it kept wildly fluctuating. It would sit in the right zone just long enough for us to think we could go do something else. Then the damn thing would see us walk into the house and snicker, and drop the temp down into the red zone. So out we’d come again, and stoke it back up, and try again. Eventually, we figured out that if we took the lid off, which seemed counterintuitive to keeping the heat in, it would let the coals get enough air to really get going. Then we could leave it alone for about two hours at a time.

But it took us half a day to learn that, and at half an hour per pound, with a 17-pound turkey, which is what I had in the freezer leftover from a turkey shoot that Junior won, minus the times where nothing was really happening at all, it looked like we’d be eating dinner at approximately 11 AM next Tuesday. So we had hamburgers, as the natives were getting restless. So much for making other people help me eat 17 pounds of turkey.

Eventually though, the skin looked right and the juices were running somewhat clearly and we were really getting tired of this crazy-ass project, so we poked it with the meat thermometer and called it good enough. Junior stripped the meat out, and it was cooked through, and it did smell pretty awesome, but I was all full from hamburgers and pretty tired of smelling smoke by that point. Although a smoked Junior still smelled delicious.

I was disappointed in how dry it was. Most of my oven-turkeys come out nice and juicy, but not this one. I had some gravy fixins ready to go, but by then it was bedtime. Junior had a sandwich and I grazed a little, but I was in no mood to stand and stir gravy.

 

I’m going to be eating smoked turkey for the rest of my life, approximately. I have the carcass in the fridge waiting to be made into stock, and turkey meat coming out of my ears. I had a smoked turkey caesar salad for lunch yesterday. Junior took some more sandwiches to work. I’m considering making turkey Divan tomorrow night. I expect by Friday, I’ll be eating smoked turkey sprinkled over ice cream or whirled into a smoothie.

Perhaps it’s time for another overly-optimistic cooking project: Meat Canning 101? I suspect he’s learned to run away screaming though.

A thread popped up on one of the boards that I frequent, about antique cookbooks and actually using them.

“Hey,” I thought, “I have several antique cookbooks, and this could be fun!”

So I went straight to the oldest one I have, published in 1908. It was probably my great-grandmother’s, and was handed down to me through my great-aunt’s line. It still has her juvenile-delinquent pencil drawings on the figures showing the cuts of meat, putting a saddle or a draft harness on each animal. She always was a rebel, my Aunt Muriel, and a kick in the pants.

That cookbook was called:

The White House Cook Book

A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home

containing

Cooking, Toilet and Household Recipes, Menus, Dinner-Giving, Table Etiquette, Care of the Sick, Health Suggestions, Facts Worth Knowing, etc.

I found surprisingly little that I could use in it. I wanted a dish that showed its age, but which we could still eat. A whole lot of it revolved around large families and dinner parties and situations for which I am simply not equipped. While I’d love to corn my own beef, I’ve looked into it before and learned that saltpeter is really hard to find these days. And I’d have to scale that back anyway, as I won’t be corning a whole side of beef at a time anyway.

I will also rarely need to call on this book to make terrapin soup, although I could see squirrel stew coming in handy once in a while considering my hobbies. I will not be making eyewash from eggs, nor Grandmother’s Universal Liniment from scratch. No, I can rely on the local Walgreen’s for my modern-day liniment needs.

There was a startling paucity of vegetable recipes, and of those that I could find, so many were so extremely overdone. An otherwise promising-looking recipe for Cucumber A La Creme called for boiling them until they were soft? Boiled cucumbers? I boggle.

But I did find the following likely dish:

Corn Pudding

This is a Virginia dish. Scrape the substance out of twelve ears of tender, green, uncooked corn (it is better scraped than grated, as you do not get those husky particles which you cannot avoid with a grater); add yolks and whites, beaten separately, of four eggs, a teaspoonful of sugar, the same of flour mixed in a tablespoonful of butter, a small quantity of salt and pepper, and one pint of milk. Bake about half or three-quarters of an hour.

So that’s more or less what I did. I cut it roughly in half, because there are only three of us, and of course, I couldn’t find green corn, but I figured yellow would do. I didn’t measure much, flying by the seat of my pants like people did then.

It started to look familiar by the time I had it mixed up and ready to pop in the oven.

And when it came out, it was clear. Yup, I’d reinvented creamed corn. It was slightly eggy, but still good, and perfectly normal.

The next one though, oh the next one. I don’t know what exactly I thought I was smoking, but I thought it would be fun to jump to the 70s, and pick something that totally showcased that poor, misbegotten decade. Yes folks, I made a jello mold.

And not just any jello mold.

No; I made jellied meat.

For this culinary masterpiece, I went to the 1972 Good Housekeeping One-Dish Dinners. There is not a doubt in my mind that I have this book through some sort of diabolical plan of my mother; maybe she slipped it into a box of perfectly normal, self-respecting books when we were cleaning out my grandparents things. Surely she couldn’t have made anything in it. Right?

This creation was actually titled Shimmering Chicken Mold. It contained chicken, ham, grapes, and watercress. Grapes. In chicken. Yes.

I cheated on this one a little too. I got me a canned ham (perfectly period, and not the cheating part), one of those roasted deli chickens, and spinach, since I couldn’t find watercress.

I dutifully halved my grapes, cubed my meat, and layered things into the closest I could come to a salad mold, a mediium-sized mixing bowl. There was a whole lot of sitting and waiting for gelatin to set with this recipe, which I bet was one of the appeals during this decade, or at least in this cookbook, which was perpetually bragging on how little time each recipe took.

Because I too have a significant evil streak, I didn’t tell the kids anything about my little social experiment. When they saw me unveil the thing, gasps of horror drowned out the television. John said, jokingly, “Is that Jello?” He was completely unnerved when I told him that yes, and it was meat jello no less.

We all talked a little, between snorting laughs about just how wrong the 70s were. He thought something like this had to come from the hippies, but no, I don’t think so. I think this came more from a generation of women brought up by full-time homemakers, but suddenly thrust into the working world, and trying to balance that with maintaining a 50s-ideal of a perfect household. Yeah, I might go off the deep and and make meat jello for my guests too, if that were dumped on me without notice.

They were sports, I have to give them that. We were all laughing too hard to eat at several points, but I really did want them to try it. And they did, and pronounced it disgusting. I ate more than they did; it wasn’t bad at first, if you could get your head away from the concept, but so salty, and so, so bland. Greens are simply not meant to be suspended in essense of chicken. Sweet bobble-headed Mary, was that shit bad. I gave the kids their leave to leave it, but they had to eat their corn before they fixed anything for themselves.

And I may have discovered the trick to getting the kids to eat their vegetables without complaint; make something truly horrifying, and the corn will seem positively mouth-watering in contrast.

And the worst part? I took all of the chickeny-hammy goodness out to the dogs. Who looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. Well, maybe I had, but I was pretty damn funny.

Because I love my own cooking and my shiny new macro lens, I spent a lot of time this evening getting up close and personal with my food.

You’d think the kids would have learned by now; that camera is an extension of my body. But no, I had to put up with completely unreasonable questions such as, “Mom, why are you taking pictures of food?”

Well, because it’s pretty, goofy kid!

We got up this morning and I had a vegetable jones, one that wouldn’t be satisfied with plain ol’ grocery store dreck. So off we went to the serious Farmer’s Market, the one without the jugglers and the food on a stick and the hordes of oddly dressed people. No, we went to the farmer’s version, which is just a little ol’ parking lot with some vendors set up, and a curious mismatch of yuppies, foodies, and poor people trying to eat on the cheap.

I spent most of my money at the same farmer whose stand I pass twice a day on my way to work, which is silly, but he wasn’t the only one.

No, I found good tomatoes and cucumbers, which was cheating a little, since I’m growing both of those. But they’re not ready yet and I’m not a patient woman.

I found a local olive oil producer who warned me that the one I’d selected was really strong. Good! The stronger, the better for some things, and this stuff is delicious.

And I found the sweetest, ripest little apricots I’ve had since we had a tree in our yard when I was growing up. Man, I should plant a tree here; apricots are by far my favorite fruit. Seamus liked them too.

I didn’t just cook local stuff tonight. I wanted to grill a tri-tip, and I like corn and artichokes with that, so that’s what I did.

I wrapped both the corn and the artichoke halves in foil with garlic butter, and threw it all on the grill as low as it would go and just left it.

Tri-tip’s got a good layer of fat on it and is notorious for flaming up and getting burned. The last time I cooked it, it was on someone else’s grill and I couldn’t get the meat far enough from the fire or the flame low enough, and it was a little too crunchy on the outside for my taste. But I know my own grill’s quirks, and it came out perfectly; maybe not quite as rare as I like it because I had to let it stand while I fixed John the noodles I’d forgotten, but it was still extremely juicy and yummy.

But the best part was the salad with those fresh tomatoes and cucumbers, a chunked-up avocado, and drizzled with that beautiful oil and salt and pepper. That couldn’t wait until dinner; it was half gone before anything was off the grill.

Now that’s what summer tastes like!

I’ve had a very domestic weekend.

First off, after doing some early jobs on Saturday, I dragged out my newly-refurbished little tiller and finally got my garden redug.

As long as it took the engine guy to fix, I was seriously kicking myself for not just having Jose do it a month ago when he offered. My tomatoes would have a healthy start by now if I had. But no, I just about outsmarted myself, thinking I’d save a little money and do it myself. A rebuilt carburator and who knows what else later, and I did not save money. But the thing purred like a damn kitten on crack, and tore both ways through my little garden bed on one tank of gas. And it should still work next year, although I’ll have to do it for the next five to make it cheaper than Jose’s prices. My arms finally stopped tingling too.

I went down to Lowe’s and got me some vegetables. After last year’s heat wave that killed off all but my cherry tomatoes, I went a little crazy and planted six different kinds. If I have too many, so what? I really like tomatoes. And I got a few herbs and a tomatillo and a cucumber tucked in there too; everything I need for a perfect summer salad. No watermelon this year, as it cross-pollinated with my cucumbers last year and made them disgusting.

Still feeling gardeny, and since I couldn’t shut the garage door until I off-loaded the potting soil and closed the tailgate on the truck, I also repotted (finally!) my poor lime tree. Between January’s freeze and the ant colony living in it, it was in sad shape, but it’s sort of pretty now. Let’s hope I didn’t shock it too much, but I’m beginning to think that it’s the Energizer Bunny of citrus trees. Without actually ever giving me any limes, but I’m an optimist.

Then, on to the cooking!

Jeff’s mom is having a welcome-home party for him tonight, and I’m bringing cheesecake and a strawberry pie. The cheesecake is just my usual, but the pie’s new to me, as is the concept of making pie crust. I was not very happy with my first effort, so I didn’t take pictures.

I do have lots of strawberries left over; daiquiris, anyone?

I was on my feet and in the kitchen for several hours all told, and after the tilling, my back was squawking. Makes me seriously wonder if I’m nuts for thinking about switching careers over to one that’s much more physical. I’m hoping that I’ll get into a little better shape with all of the valve-exercising and plumbing that I’ll have to do, but I predict some serious “what have I done” thoughts in the first few weeks of that job. Which I do not have yet. I am, however, about to sign a contract on a pure consulting job for them, which is either an audition or a gateway to being hired without an interview, I’m not sure yet.

All of that domesticity, and the laundry pile seems bigger than ever. I guess I’ll get to that next. Stupid laundry!