A good day for Borscht

It's cold again this morning.  I guess winter really is coming.  The wood stove has been a real treasure these past two weeks or so.  By the way, the red beans I cooked on the stove turned our great.  It inspired me to look into other things to cook on the wood stove.  I was thinking about having to using the wood stove as our only source of heat and cooking.  There are a few things that we simply cannot live without, at least not at first.  My first thought was about coffee.  We have an electric drip coffee maker like the rest of world that depends on the electric company.  When I was a kid my dad made coffee on the gas stove in a little aluminum percolator coffee pot.  I used that percolator when I went camping in the woods in Florida as a teenager.  I have no idea what ever happened to that beat up percolator but I know it made good coffee.  I went to Amazon and found a reasonably priced, stainless steel percolator, about $20.00.  I also splurged on the $1.99 glass top for it since it came with a plastic one.  Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I did that, but looks really cool and if you are going to use something you should like it.  I like it with the glass top. I made coffee in the percolator this morning but I confess I did it on the stove in the kitchen, not the wood stove, because I was cooking this morning - more about that below.  The coffee was OK but I need to relearn making coffee in the percolator.  Lesson #1, no matter how much of a good idea it seems like, don't use a paper filter.  Maybe the next pot will be on the wood stove without the paper filter.  I also looked at a bunch of cast iron cookware and came to a startling discovery.  Most cast iron cookware available in the USA is made in China.  That is unsat in the extreme.  There are a couple of cast iron companies in America but they will not be enough to sustain us all if things really go to pot.  The lesson there is: buy your cast iron now. 

So yesterday we did some work in the garden.  I stacked another layer of tire on top of the tire gardens that have the winter veggies in them and we covered the top with re-purposed windows that Steph got from a demolition project this summer.  The long term plan for the windows is a small green house, but we didn't get there this year.  The timing was perfect, we had a hard frost this morning and our tender young spinach, cabbage, radishes and cauliflower were covered.  The plan is that the black tires will absorb heat and the clear windows will allow the sunshine in.  The windows are placed loosely atop the tires so hopefully they will ventilate well without being drafty.

While in the garden I pulled the last of the sweet potatoes from the ground and was pleasantly surprised at the amount and sizes of them.  We had baked sweet potatoes with our dinner last night, have plenty of large ones for another few meals plus a good sized pile of small and ugly ones for peeling, boiling and baking as sweet potato casserole.  Yummy.  The other thing I pulled was the very last of the beets.  With a good number of beets in the frig and the ones I just pulled I was inspired to think of cold-weather beet recipes.  Borscht came to mind.  I've never made borscht but I've eaten a fair amount.  I was totally spoiled a couple of years ago when I went to a friend's house for a Christmas party and he had made borscht.  I learned some good tips from him.  Occasionally someone at work will make borscht and bring it work.  So I looked up recipes and recalled the lessons I learned from Mark, who made it for his Christmas party.  There are as many recipes for borscht as there are little Slavic babushkas.  There is Ukrainian borscht, Russian borscht, Polish borscht and now there is Tacketts Mill Farm borscht.  Otleechna! 

I took my beets, washed and peeled them and grated/shredded them by hand.  That was work, but I hope the extra effort and love translate into extra beety goodness in the borscht.  I also cut the large beets into small chunks because I like beets and the chunks add some texture.  I kept three or four small beets and threw them in whole.  I added sour kraut, a step I saw in a recipe on line, chunked up some small carrots, sliced up a large onion, added the heart of a celery, garlic from the garden, beef broth and sea salt.  It is simmering as I type this.  If it is bad I will be unhappy because I grew those beets myself and hate to waste food.  Mark told me "Borscht is like gumbo," he knows I came here from Louisiana and all good teachers put their lessons into context for their understudies, "you just build on the basics."  So, that is what I have done.  Mark had meat in his borscht.  I do not, at least not this time.  I have a large pot of this beet soup and will doubtless bring some to work for my coworkers, a couple of whom really know their borscht.  I don't think the Manischwitz family has anything to fear from my version just yet, but I guess it is possible I could become a beet soup billionaire if I hit just right.  This is America, after all.

Re-elect Nobody

My favorite bumper sticker from this election said "Re-elect Nobody".  That's pretty much how I feel about it.  I went this morning and did my duty as an American citizen to arrest this country's fatal spiraling nose dive to the left.  I hope the message is abundantly clear to all of our elected officials that we are sick of the same old shit.  My brother described it pretty well.  He explained Obama's election as a reaction to us all being pissed off at George Bush and his idiot cronies running the country into the ground, totally screwing up two wars, letting Rumsfeld destroy relationships with our long standing allies in "Old Europe", etc, etc, combined with Mr. No Personality Except for Grumpy Old Guy McCain - what else were we going to do except lurch toward the charismatic guy who talked a good game.  We came out looking progressive and thoughtful.  He turned out to be a friggin' commie intent to ram his agenda home in spite of wide spread outrage.  I guess he thinks he knows best.  We didn't elect him to know best, we elected him to do what we tell him to do.  Got it?  I hope so.


Don't get me wrong.  I voted for the grumpy guy.

Wood Stove Cooking

Every once in a while I get a wild hair and have to try something new.  Cooking on a wood stove is something I have thought about plenty and even watched a bunch of YouTube videos about.  This morning we got our first real cold temperatures.  When I woke up it was 30 degrees.  OK, that may not be "real" cold to folks in Minot or Anchorage, but here in the Old Dominion that qualifies as cold.  Cold enough to spend the time to get the wood stove going so I could cut the chill in the house.  Our wood stove is a simple little Vogelsang Boxwood stove, nothing spectacular.  The only real modern innovation is the electric heat reclaimer that blows hot air captured from the stovepipe back into the room.  Its a pretty nifty gadget and it works like nobody's business.  I got the stove rocking this morning!  It is toasty in the living room, where the wood stove is located.  As long as I keep feeding it wood it keeps kickin' out the warmth.  So, I was thinking about the slow cooker and my thoughts turned to the wood stove.  I have never cooked on it before and I thought I would try something simple.  I pulled out a blue enameled camp style dutch oven, rinsed out some dried red beans and put that puppy on the stove.  I removed one of the little, round cooking-burner covers and set the beans over it.  It heated up to boiling MUCH faster than I expected, which was encouraging.  I cut up an onion and some dried Anaheim chili peppers from the garden, found that special, big, meaty ham bone I've been saving for some special pot of something, added some water and let her go.  It's been cooking since about 0900 and its about mid-day now.  The smell is tremendous. I took the lid off of the dutch oven to help cook down some of the water I added to cover the ham bone, and the smell of the boiling beans and ham is being circulated around the house by the heat reclaimer.  I'm ready to eat right now!  The good part is this is my proof of concept that if we lose power we can still cook and feed ourselves.  We've been blessed so far that every winter when the storms come we have not lost power long enough to cause a problem.  But now we know, if it happens we can boil some dried beans and veggies from the garden.  Maybe next I'll try that dutch oven bread recipe I saw on YouTube.  I'll let you know how the beans turn out.

Countdown to Firearms Season

Deer season for hunters using modern firearms in Stafford County, Virginia, opens on the 13th of November. I am hopeful that we can put at least one well fed doe in the freezer this season. Turkey season is open right now and there is an abundance of wild turkey around here. Not being properly equipped for wild turkey season, in my own opinion, keeps me from spending any time waiting for a turkey to cross my sights. It is archery season now but I do not own a bow and have never tried bow hunting. I have nothing against bow hunting, but I prefer not to launch an arrow, stick it into a deer and then have to follow a blood trail hoping that it does not leave my little patch of woods and cross onto someone else's property before it drops dead. I prefer to stick to my plan to ambush a deer with my .12ga slug gun and not have to worry about the deer running much at all. I went on-line and bought a DVD on how to butcher deer for maximum meat. I also bought a really good 5" boning knife. I recommend a website called "Ask The Meatman" for anyone serious about learning more about butchering deer, beef, and pork. They have great videos, they sell knives, have recipes and basically everything you need to know about processing your own meat. I think the average American has completely lost a connection to where meat comes from. The closest we come to understanding is possibly seeing a cut chart on the wall of our grocery store butcher counter showing a cow with lines that map out the cuts of meat. Plenty of deer hunters take their deer to a processor/butcher who cut it and wrap it for them. I want a better understanding of the process and I want to control how my meat animals are raised, how they are treated during their lives and how they are killed and butchered for my family's consumption. It only takes a few minutes on YouTube to get a good understanding of how our grocery store meat is raised, (over) inoculated, treated like something less than a fellow created being during their lives, often over crowded, hardly ever given anything approaching a natural life, and then terrorized in their final moments of life, killed by uncaring, low paid employees of industrial meat processing plants and butchered in less than sanitary conditions that barely meet the low standards of the US Drug and Food Administration. Our answer is to raise our own poultry, ensure they have good lives, are treated humanely throughout their lives, not given unnecessary drugs or poor feed and then killed in a humane way and processed in a sanitary way by me, not "some guy" who couldn't care less about the health of my family. There are a number of farms around here that offer pasture raised beef that is slaughtered and processed on the farm by the farmer. That tends to be what we prefer.

Fall is here - at last!

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I love when the long, hot days turn into cool evenings and mornings. Fall always reminds me of Europe, for some reason. I remember the cool days and the Volksmarches in Germany, the walks through immaculately maintained woodlands, the breezes that carried brightly colored leaves to the ground, the smell of the Earth, the warmth of the Sun. We have a great fall season here in Virginia. Halloween is normally a blast because the temperature is just right. Fall is apple harvest season and I cannot wait for our apple trees to begin bearing fruit. It is also pumpkin season. We only got a few small pumpkins this year. Next year I'll plant them later and pay more attention to them than I did this year. One thing that fall always reminds me of is hunting season. I've never been a big hunter but, having worked in the firearms industry for years, I always look forward to fall because the American hunter takes his sport seriously. This year I've decided that, since we have the land and the deer, I'll try to fill my limit. I'm not a trophy hunter. I want meat. So, I took my Remington 870, which was originally intended for home defense, and bought myself a great, used, 24" rifled slug barrel with a cantilever scope mount. Thank God for the Second Amendment and Gunbroker.com. After researching a bit I decided to try the Winchester Supreme .12 gauge, 3", 385 grain, partition Gold sabot slug. I stole the little red dot scope off of my tricked out Kalashnikov and put it on my slug barrel. To make a long story short, I sighted that puppy in at 25 yards, based on my planned kill zone, in only two rounds. I can't wait. The plan is to put a couple of big, healthy does in the freezer as roasts, steaks and ground meat. I LOVE me some deer chili!

Time to start the Autumn Garden

Summer has been busy and productive around the farm. The garden has produced a LOT of tomatoes, to our delight, the corn did really well and is now done for the year. We canned homemade tomato sauce and homemade stewed tomatoes. Beet pickling next. Since we have run the course of the summer garden I have started some more broccoli and lettuce for the fall garden. We will also put in some more spinach, cauliflower, cabbage and green beans. The green beans I planted in the summer garden never really got into production but the super-long asparagus beans I planted were not very tasty and produced small amounts per bean stalk. I won't plant them again.

The bees are doing well, I have added another brood box and a honey super. They girls are really busy during the day and are a joy to watch as they buzz around the hive.

Fresh Corn!

Well, we are definitely doing much better this year than in years past. We have eaten all the spinach, picked all of the broccoli, finished all of the lettuce, harvested the onions and garlic, the beets are ready to be harvested, we are pulling monster cukes from the garden, the first red tomatoes are being picked and joy of joys, we are eating fresh corn from the garden with out super tonight! Man, this is why we planted a garden!