Monthly Archives: December 2011
Foodie Friday- Homemade Pita Chips and Organic Hummus
Do you need to detox after the holidays? Don’t know what to make for the vegetarian friends you’ve invited to your New Year’s party? Try these pita chips with a healthy scoop of traditional hummus.
To make my own pita chips, I like to use Ezekiel pocket bread because it’s made with sprouted grains. To begin, remove each pita round from the package and separate the halves so that you have two thin circles. Tear these circles into several chip-size pieces and place close together on a cookie sheet. It’s most efficient if you have two cookie sheets so that while one batch is baking, you can make a second batch. Continue reading
Your Hobby- Traveling
Where have you traveled?
We just made it home from our whirlwind Christmas and I think I’ll get my post up just in time to still make the Wednesday “deadline”. As we sat in the car for hours upon hours today, it made me think of all the people who travel on a regular basis. I do love to see new places, and I love the idea of traveling, but I don’t get to go as often as I’d like. A few places that I have visited include Colorado Springs, CO. Continue reading
Foodie Friday- Organic Gingerbread Recipe
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I don’t think this gingerbread would be house-making material, but it is so delicious!
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
Melt 1/2 cup of organic butter, let cool
Beat together 1/2 c of organic sugar and 1 farm fresh egg
Add to egg/sugar/butter: Continue reading
Hatching Our First Baby Chicks
For my husband’s birthday this past summer, I bought him an egg incubator (It’s what he asked for). I gave it to him early, because I get so excited about giving people their gifts that I have a hard time waiting. Once he opened it we were both very excited about the prospect of maintaining our own flock of laying hens, and best of all, watching our own farm-raised eggs hatch into healthy baby chicks!
My husband immediately plugged the incubator in downstairs and added the called-for water. It took three days for the incubator to reach the appropriate temperature and humidity. On the fourth day we carefully placed thirty six eggs into the incubator and closed the lid with a thrill of anticipation.
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Your Artistic Outlet- Homemade Christmas Ornaments
For me, opening up the big box of hand-me-down ornaments to hang on the Christmas tree is like opening a coffer of priceless treasures. I love decorating the Christmas tree, and I love holding each ornament and remembering where it came from, who made it, gave it, or simply thinking back to Christmas as a child and hanging many of the very same ornaments. Continue reading
A Lesson in Sharing
By early July Jasmine, our new Jersey heifer calf, had survived her first month through the excessive heat. Now she was thriving. We’d stopped milking Josie, our original milk cow, to allow her milk to dry up and give her a break before she had another calf. We started milking Jedda, Jasmine’s mother.
Jedda is a very calm and sweet-natured cow, but since this was her first calf she had never been milked before. I described the initial difficulty with her kicking at Jasmine in Jasmine’s birth story. She’d mostly stopped that, but it didn’t mean she wanted anyone other than her baby messing around with her teats. Hey, I get that. Continue reading
Foodie Friday– Winter’s Nourishing Bounty
This weeks Foodie Friday post features our very own organically raised pastured pork. We prefer to grill our pork chops and pork steaks, but since the grill doesn’t typically get fired up in December, I broiled these for approximately 10 minutes on each side.
The complementary vegetable is spaghetti squash which we didn’t grow, but one of our good friends shared with us from their own organic family farm. Continue reading
Your Artistic Outlet- A Comparison of Ancient and Modern Pottery
Fire hardened clay objects have been around for a long time. When I decided to write about pottery, my mission was to discover exactly how long. I was surprised by the answers that I found.
The Venus of Dolni Vestonice, a small exaggerated female form likely representing fertility, is the oldest know and surviving piece of ceramic artwork. It was discovered in 1925 in what is now the Czech Republic but is believed to have been created by the Gravettian culture between 23,000 and 27,000 B.C. This was a time of stone tool use and big game hunting; think Jean Auel’s Mammoth Hunters.
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Farm Sitting
The act of taking care of a farm while the actual owners of the farm are away.
Click continue reading to check out some websites on farm sitting. Continue reading
A Bull Joins the Farm
In March of 2011 a friendly local farmer offered to loan us one of his bulls in order to breed back our slowly expanding herd of cows. This was a very generous offer, one we deeply appreciated but initially refused. The problem was that we had one Angus heifer and two Jersey cows. Why is this a problem? We wanted the Jersey’s to be bred back by a Jersey bull, so that we would get Jersey calves. The Angus is our beef stock, so she would need to be bred with a bull that fell into the beef cattle category. So, we intended to have them all artificially inseminated. Well, as so often happens, we got busy and did not get the cows “taken care of”. At the end of April my husband volunteered to help the previously mentioned friendly local farmer move some cattle. Though I do not actually remember deciding to accept the offer of the bull, I distinctly remember the day that he joined the farm.
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