All These Chickens!

Posted on: April 25th, 2012 by Aden

File under: Chooks

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A friend asked me yesterday why I haven’t posted anything in a long time, and it’s because I have been relentlessly working on getting the farm running in time for Jon to finish law school. He will indeed be DONE with law school forever tonight at 6 PM CST, and arriving home tomorrow at one. We had our fair share of up’s-and-downs the entire time and after all his hard work I am so proud of him.

We have a few weeks to get our farmstand built before we fly to Missouri for his long-awaited graduation ceremony and he starts his new career that following Monday. Vegetables and fruit are going into the ground, soil is being tilled, goats are milking, the rooster is crowing and we have been overrun with chickens! We have Americauna’s hatching left and right. We plan to use the Americauna’s for the pretty blue eggs and the other birds will give us home-grown meat, and we will sell the rest.

Recipes will be coming soon, as will the website for our farm. I would love to post more, but I have 100 chicks hatching tomorrow and need to pick up Jon at the airport at 1. When I find time to breathe I will surely come up to catch my breath and post more. In the meantime, please enjoy the photos. Bandit is the gorgeous new addition to our family. He is the pretty boy with the half-blue eye and although we fell in love with him, so did Bella, you can almost see the twinkle of love in her eyes.


Very Berry Cherry Pie

Posted on: March 22nd, 2012 by Aden

File under: Recipes

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Very Berry Pie

Yesterday was the first day of Spring, 2012 and I remembered I had some frozen fruit left over from the Fall farmers market, so I decided to make a pie for a friend who has helped me out these past few months since settling in on the farm. Things have been tough without Jon since he is finishing up law school. He was just home for his 2 week Spring vacation, which was a lot of fun. Now he’s in the home stretch, and I am extremely excited that he will be graduating law school in only 5 weeks: then he’s home for good. Still, having a friend willing to give a helping hand on the farm has helped me out tremendously.

We call this pie “Very Berry Pie”, and I can’t begin to tell you how many people have told us that it’s the best pie they’ve ever had. I have yet to enter it into a pie contest but you better believe that I will soon, and I am pretty sure I could take first place. We made this recipe for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and even just as a dessert for having guests over. You can serve it warm, or even with vanilla iced cream on top, and it will NEVER disappoint.

This is one of those recipes that seems like it may be hard to make from the photos, because it looks like a work of art. In reality it’s so easy to make, and it has come out flawlessly every single time we’ve made it. The greatest thing about this recipe is you can prepare all of the different components (the crust, filling and topping) separately the day before, and then just put them together when you’re ready to make the pie! If you decide to go this route, I highly recommend shaping the crust into the pie pan and placing it in the freezer, so that all you need to do the next day is pour in the filling and top it all off with crumble! Just remember to refrigerate the crumble and filling while waiting to assemble, and let them come to room temperature before baking, so that the baking time isn’t thrown off.

We have adapted this recipe so many times over the years to help it evolve into a pie so mouth watering you and your dinner mates will just keep wanting more. It’s got the perfect combination of sweet, tangy, salty and butteryness (which isn’t a word, but should be!), and the crust and topping are absolutely to die for.

This is not one of those cheap supermarket cherry pies. You can use fresh or frozen fruit and I can guarantee you will love this cherry pie, even if you’ve disliked them in the past. This one will change your mind for sure. Jon told me that he never actually liked pie growing up, but that this is one of the few and rare pies that is so good that he actually loves it. Anyway, in the words of the wonderful Ina Garten, “Who doesn’t love pie”? Enjoy.

Very Berry Pie Crumble

Recipe: Very Berry Cherry Pie

Ingredients

Filling

    • 5 cups frozen cherries
    • 1 16 oz. bag frozen blueberries
    • 1 cup dried cherries
    • 1 cup sugar
    • 1/4 cup cornstarch
    • 1/2 tsp. almond extract (or any other kind to your taste, but I highly suggest you use the almond)
    • 1/2 fresh lemon juice squeezed
    • 1 pinch zest of orange or tangerine

Crust

    • 1.5 cup all purpose flour
    • 1 tsp. kosher salt
    • 1 T sugar
    • 1/4 tsp. baking powder
    • 1 stick cultured butter at room temperature (use generic unsalted if you can’t find it)

Crumb Topping

  • 1 cup all purpose flour
  • 1 cup sugar
  • 1 stick cultured butter at room temperature (or salted regular butter if you can’t find it)
  • 1/2 tsp salt (only use 1/4 if you use regular salted butter)

Instructions

  1. Mix all of the filling ingredients, except for the frozen blueberries, in a sauce pan on medium heat, stirring constantly until it thickens and comes to a boil. If you walk away for even a second it will burn and stick to the bottom of the pan. Once thickened, set aside to rest and cool.
  2. Mix all crust ingredients together in a food processor until it forms into small balls. Fill a glass with cold water and add some ice and after a minute of allowing the water to chill, slowly pulse the food processor and drip in the cold water until all the ingredients combine together into one large mass. Remove crust from processor and knead it down into a square and wrap with plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour. The longer you refrigerate it the better, but I find if you leave it overnight it helps to let it warm a bit to room temperature before working it, so it spreads more evenly.
  3. To make the crumb topping, combine everything into food processor and pulsate until it looks like crumbs. Leave it in the food processor until ready to top the pie and pulse it a few more times before adding it to the top.
  4. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
  5. After at least 60 minutes have passed, remove the crust from the refrigerator and roll it out on a floured surface until it is big enough to overlap the sides of the pie pan when filling it. Cut a circle into to the crust around the side of the pie pan so that the crust will fit once you place it in the pie pan.
  6. Place the crust into the pie pan. I always find it easiest to roll it around my rolling pin, and then unroll it over the pan, helping it fit as evenly as possible. At this point you can use whichever technique you would like on the edges of the pie to make it look good but I prefer pinching (index finger on one hand between the thumb and index finger of the other) or using a fork.
  7. Add the entire bag of frozen blueberries into the pie pan, layering the bottom of the crust. Add room temperature filling to the top of the blueberries and spread out evenly. Pulse the crumb topping a few more times and then sprinkle it over the pie.
  8. Bake for 50 – 60 minutes until the crust is golden brown as shown in our photos, and the filling is bubbly.
  9. Let cool for 30 minutes or longer before serving and enjoy!

Preparation time: 30 minute(s)

Cooking time: 1 hour(s)

Number of servings (yield): 12


Pekin Ducklings First Swim

Posted on: March 6th, 2012 by Aden

File under: Tails & Whiskers

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We picked up some Pekin ducklings that were just hatched because we wanted to take advantage of the vast abundance of pond water on our new property. We are hoping to breed out these beautiful ducks in the future and hatch the eggs in our incubator for resale.

While they really stink and make a lot of noise, they are absolutely adorable and we are so glad to be raising them. In just a few weeks they will be able to go outside for a few months and stay with our chickens and goats until we can build them a nesting box on the side of the pond. They may even help keep the weeds from growing along the edge of the water but only time will tell!

Today was their first big adventure into the water, and even though it was just our tub, they had a blast. I never thought a baby duck, only a few weeks old would splash around with such ease. It’s like they were born in the wild or something. They all knew how to swim instinctively, and even went under water a lot. I hope you enjoy this video as much as we do!


Springtime Soon

Posted on: February 24th, 2012 by Aden

File under: Tails & Whiskers

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The weather is warming, the ground is thawing and we are getting ready to prepare the soil for our very large vegetable and fruit gardens. Everything is exciting, and we are even tapping maple trees right now for making syrup!

With everything going on, our hens are laying beautiful eggs, and our goat Dotty finally had her kid. Once all are weaned we will have plenty of milk for cheese and butter, and maybe even some yogurt! I have to get back outside now and start splitting more wood for next Winter, so please enjoy the photos below of our cat Fuzzball, our new baby goat, and our other goat Baby Blue who was born a month ago and is really loving the warm sun!

Queen Fuzzball


Homestead Sourdough

Posted on: February 22nd, 2012 by Aden

File under: Bread, Recipes

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Dutch Oven SourdoughFor years I’ve been trying to bake the perfect loaf of bread: a golden crunchy crust with a soft, light inside and smooth but complex flavors. I finally found the closest thing to perfection yet after a few experiments last week.

Jon is finishing up his last semester of law school right now in Missouri before he starts his job at a firm in Providence and the time apart has been brutal for us. This past weekend he came home for a visit and we tested out a few batches of this amazing recipe and it was by far the best bread either of us have ever had. We baked the first loaf on Saturday morning when my parents came down to help around the farm, as they do most weekend. The entire house was filled with the scent of this bubbly, delicious sourdough, making all of us hungry.

If you have ever baked a sourdough, then you will know that you use barm as a replacement for yeast in order to make the dough rise. Barm is made over the course of many days, taking on naturally occurring bacteria from the air and ultimately fermenting the dough. The best part is, you can keep it in your refrigerator for a lifetime, and just keep refreshing it as you use it.

I am not going to post a recipe for making the barm because there are so many variations. I suggest you do some research on google and find a great way to make your own. We keep ours in a mason jar in the refrigerator, and have had barms last for years in the past. Our recipe comes from a book by Peter Reinhart called The Bread Baker’s Apprentice which I highly recommend if you want to delve into the wonderful science and art of baking your own bread.

Throughout the course of experimenting, we found that, like so many things, the quality of ingredients really matters. That is why it’s imperative that you use a high quality flour. Anything less will result in a mediocre bread that won’t melt in your mouth. Also, like many other things, patience really pays off here. The bread takes two days to make, but it’s well worth it. If you aren’t ready to experiment with barm and making sourdough, you can use yeast instead and just bake a regular white bread. Baking this dough in a dutch oven gives it the perfect crust and the texture of the final product is like nothing we have ever tasted. Good luck with this, and don’t give up if it fails the first few times, anything worth having is worth waiting for!

Recipe: Dutch Oven Homestead Sourdough

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup barm
  • 1 cup bread flour
  • 1/4 to 1/2 warm tap water
  • 4 1/2 cups bread flour
  • 3 tsp. kosher salt
  • 1 1/2 to 2 cups warm tap water
  • 1 tsp. cornmeal for dusting

Instructions

  1. For the starter, allow the barm to come to room temperature in your mixing bowl before adding other ingredients.
  2. Add 1 cup flour and 1/4 to 1/2 cup water, mixing with the dough hook on medium speed for 5 minutes until combined. Adjust flour and water so that dough is not too dry, and sticks slightly to the side of the mixer.
  3. Oil a ceramic or glass bowl and transfer the starter to the bowl. Cover with plastic and allow to ferment on a warm counter, or in an oven with the light on, for 5 – 10 hours. After it has fermented place the bowl in the refrigerator overnight.
  4. By morning the starter should have doubled in size. Allow it to come to room temperature before mixing the final dough.
  5. Add the starter back to mixing bowl. On medium speed, with a dough hook, mix remaining flour, and water. Add the salt and mix for 5 minutes. Allow dough to rest for 10 minutes, and mix for another 5.
  6. Generously oil a large ceramic or glass mixing bowl and transfer the dough, cover with plastic, and allow it to continue into the final rise. This may take all day in a warm spot or oven. The higher it rises, the better.
  7. Using a napkin, add a liberal amount of oil, and grease the inside of a dutch oven, including the underside of the lid.
  8. Preheat oven to 475 degrees, and place the dutch oven into the oven while it preheats.
  9. When oven is done preheating, remove dutch oven and carefully remove the lid. You may need to spread around the oil a bit more to coat the lid and sides. Sprinkle cornmeal for dusting onto the bottom, sides and top of lid.
  10. Very carefully, taking care not to deflate the dough, pour the dough from the bowl into the hot dutch oven. It should slide right out if you used enough oil. You may need to use a spatula, but this will deflate some of the rising in the dough.
  11. Place the lid back on the dutch oven and bake for 30 minutes. After 5 minutes of baking, throw a cup of water into the bottom of the oven to fill with steam.
  12. After 30 minutes, remove the lid from the dutch oven and cook further for another 15 to 20 minutes. Cool for 20 minutes, serve with butter and enjoy.

Preparation time: 2 hour(s)

Cooking time: 50 minute(s)

Number of servings (yield): 8