Twelve

These birthdays, they just keep coming. My middle child is twelve.

I think I ask this every time, but it bears repeating.

How does this happen?



A study in contrasts.

Hates her name.

Makes us laugh.

(And sigh.)

Giving.

Funny.

Feisty.



And we love every bit of her. Happy Birthday, Liver Q.

Love,
Yo Mama

1 year ago:

Sampling

Eleven

At the back door

I hate when they do this. Sit there and gaze longingly in the mudroom door, looking all sweet and cute and cuddly.

Must. Resist.

Day to Day :: September 23, 2009

Things felt different this morning. Despite a night of almost no sleep there was a calm, a peace, a rightness inside me that I hadn't felt since I don't remember when.

In that sliver of time between the kids leaving for school and me heading upstairs to my office for the day job, I slipped on my boots and just walked around outside. Everything was still damp from yesterday's rain, and green and earthy-smelling. The morning sun made everything glisten and come to life. I pulled a few of the most obnoxious weeds from the flower beds.

The amazing thing was the silence. The cattle quietly munched hay. The pigs napped in the new mud. The hens searched the lawn for bugs.

It was the sound of contentment.

1 year ago:

Orangeglo

Fall

I wanna be a cowboy

Wow...and another survey

Wow, you guys are so good! You already maxed out Olivia's first survey! (SurveyMonkey only allows 100 responses for the free version.) Thank you!

A number of people left a comment here, or on Facebook, what your "Other" choice was. Which got me to wondering if SurveyMonkey would let us set up a survey that would capture that "Other" choice. Whaddyaknow, it does!

So...here's a new survey that allows you to enter what your "Other" choice is:

Click Here to take Olivia's survey #2

The results from the first survey were:
Pizza 35
Other 33
Ice Cream 17
Mac & Cheese 7
Popcorn 6
Hot Dogs 2

Thank you again!

Help with homework, please?

So Olivia has a homework assignment to create a survey question and collect responses from at least 75 people. Being my daughter and all, she asked if she could hijack the blog for the assignment.


The student

So if you would, please click the link below to take her survey:

Olivia's survey

Thanks for your help! Hopefully she'll get an "A" :)

How to Cook : Aunt Sandy's Oven Crispy Chicken

I mentioned earlier that we had another batch of chickens butchered last week. Usually I just get them all as whole birds. But our processor does do cut-ups, so I decided to try that out this time and got about two thirds of them cut up.

I was thinking for supper tonight I'd just do the usual - the "Sunday Chicken and Rice" recipe from my church cookbook. I love church cookbooks. They're a collection of everyone's best recipes (so you know they're good) but they're also a little bit of a memory book. Many of the ladies whose recipes appear in this cookbook from 1981 have passed on. Some of them were my Sunday School teachers. I still remember which pew some of them sat in every Sunday. And I remember some of these recipes appearing at monthly church potluck dinners.

As I was flipping through the cookbook looking for that usual recipe, another caught my eye. It's from my Aunt Sandy, who passed away from cancer in (I think) the spring of 2000. I think about her all the time - usually when I'm oiling down my stainless steel sink with vegetable oil, because I remember her saying she did that every night before bed. Or when I'm telling Rafe to stop running in the house, because I remember her telling how she used to say that to her oldest, my cousin Chris, all the time.

I hadn't ever noticed this recipe before, but she was a great cook so I knew I had to try it. And wow. It was good. It was so good that it reminded Rafe we hadn't said the "food prayer" before supper, and he made us all stop right there so he could say it.

We're usually dark meat people, because none of us like dry white chicken breast. But tonight we literally bargained with each other for a hunk of breast meat. It was so tender and juicy. Just wow. That's the best I can come up with. Just wow.

Not only was it good, but it's super easy to whip up. It uses ingredients that I always have on hand, and took no time to prepare. I baked some Bush Delicata Squash - one of the few things to make it out of our garden alive this year - in the oven right alongside the chicken. Some Cottage Cheese Dill bread from the farmers market rounded out our plates.


Sorry, food photography is so not my forte!

So, without further adieu, the recipe!

Aunt Sandy's Oven Crispy Chicken

1 chicken, cut up
1 egg
2 T. milk
2 T. minced dried onion
1 c. instant potato flakes
1/2 T. chili powder
1/4 c. Parmesan cheese
1/4 c. butter

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Place butter in shallow baking pan and put in the oven while it preheats, until butter is melted. Remove from oven.

Combine onion, potato flakes, chili powder and parmesan cheese in a shallow bowl. Combine egg and milk in another shallow bowl. Salt and pepper chicken, then dip in egg/milk mixture. Then roll in potato mixture. Place skin side down in baking pan and bake 30 minutes; turn chicken pieces over and bake another 30 minutes.

Laborful day

Mmm, hams!

Labor Day was indeed a day of labor for us. Fortunately many hands make light work! Our customer-friends & their daughter volunteered to come over & help, and we were so glad they did. How nice was that, spending their holiday wrangling our chickens :)

But before we got to the chicken wrangling, they helped us load 3 pigs and haul them to the locker.



And then herd the current batch of feeders into the vacated space.



Then we loaded 150 3-week-old broiler chicks into the trailer, hauled them out to the pasture, unloaded each one again and placed them into the shed in the pasture.



Then it was time to load 150 7-week-old broiler chickens into the trailer. One. By. One. It's a good workout for arms & shoulders!





At that point we let our friends head home. We hauled the chickens to the processor at Greene, and unloaded each one again there. Then it was back home, with a treat of supper from the drive-in. It was a good day, and a lot of big jobs done with a little help from our friends. Thanks, guys!

1 year ago:

Speaking of stocking up

A peek at the chick brooder

Take a hike

Take a hike, part 2

A little help here?

Fatman

In the chaos that seems to be life these days, we've lost the lists of who ordered what.

This situation is giving me a stomachache.

If I have a filled-out order form, and/or a deposit check, we're good.

But we took 3 pigs to the locker yesterday. Our neighbor is getting one. We were keeping one to sell at farmers market. But I can't remember who wanted the third one. Obviously it was someone that said "Put me down for a whole hog" but didn't fill out the form or give us a deposit.

Or, the other possibility, we didn't actually have it sold & were keeping 2 for the farm.

So...if it was you that asked for a hog for August/September and you haven't heard from me, please give me a call or an email asap.

Or...if you'd like this here hog - if we don't hear from the person that actually ordered it - also give me a call or an email asap. The locker will be wanting to cut it up in the next few days. This is the last of the girls' 4-H pigs, so the money actually goes to them, and the breeding on this pig is a little leaner than what the October pigs will be.

And...we're also still taking orders for:

*Chickens - Batch 3 will be ready the end of this week, Batch 4 the first week of October. We are now offering them either whole or cut up.

*Pork - The first of our new genetics will be ready the end of October. Tasty! Order half or whole hog.

*Beef - Butchering will start in November and continue through December. We do quarters & halves, and also bundles which are an 1/8th of beef - about 50 pounds that includes the full range of cuts - steaks, roasts, ground, etc.

To order email sugarcreekfarm (at) osage (dot) net

Day to Day :: September 1, 2009

It took all of us to flush the stray pig out of the cornfield. Giggles, and shouts of "I found him! Over here!" drifted out from the thick dark green mass of rustling leaves.

Would I miss this, if we stop farming? I know I'd miss telling the story.