by A Farm Girl | Nov 21, 2019 | Recipes
Fueled by my homesteading spirit, I am currently dreaming of getting a dairy cow. I just love the idea of having fresh, homemade, and preservative- and additive-free dairy products.
Well, I had to promise DH that I would hold off on the cow for at least another year and until I have a better handle on everything currently requiring my attention. I can completely understand his concerns. In the last 18 or so months since moving to the farm, I have taken on a massive load of extra work.
Just dealing with a house that is about 3 times the size of our old house has been an adjustment. We have to keep up with mowing the 7 or so acres of pasture and lawn (thanks mom for all your long hours on the mower this summer!) Learning how to manage pastures in a real setting as opposed to on paper has been an adventure. We also put in a gigantic 32×30 foot garden that I attempted to work that all summer (at least until the bermuda grass got so bad that I couldn’t stay on top of the weeds anymore – more on my new garden plan is coming soon). Plus, I have also started homeschooling DS & DD. Both are still learning to read so school time is still very hands on for me.
So, with all of that and more, I have more than I can handle and have reluctantly promised DH that I will wait on my cow.
Okay. Sorry about the crazy long introduction to my adventures in butter making. 🙂
I figured that if I want to eventually get a cow, I needed to practice and get in the habit of regularly making dairy products that we normally use. I decided to start with butter, which seemed like the easiest first step.
To make butter, you basically beat up heavy cream until the butter and buttermilk separate. First, I tried it in my KitchenAid mixer. That was fun and pretty easy but had two major negatives. 1. It made a huge, greasy mess! 2. It took close to an hour. But, the butter was really good! Plus, the buttermilk pancakes that I made the next morning were really good too.
Next, in an effort on contain the mess, I tried making butter in my blender. It was all going wonderfully until just after it started to separate when the heat from the blender softened the butter up so much that it blended into the buttermilk. I moved it to the KitchenAid, hoping to undo the problem and just made a bigger mess. Since I had been at it for over an hour and didn’t really feel like sticking the mixer bowl full of butter in the fridge for a while then trying again, I threw in some salt and mixed it for a few more minutes. I ended up with very tasty whipped butter.
Well, I started looking for a contained butter churn and found an old fashion, hand crank one. It said that it made butter in 10 min. I figured that it was worth a try, so I bit the bullet and ordered on. I tried it today.
The instructions said that the cream needed to be left at room temperature for 1-2 hours. After my experience last time, I was hesitant to let the cream get too warm so I tried it after about 45 min. Twenty minutes of hand cranking later (quite a workout) and still liquidy. I left it for another hour and tried again. Another 20 min of hand cranking (Ouch!) and still nothing. Another hour. Another 20 min. By this time, my arms felt like I had been carrying water buckets all day. Still just cream. 🙁 (Did I mention that I pulled the cream out of the basement fridge that is set on super cold?)
In desperation, I just left it alone until the entire thing felt close to room temperature and tried again. 10-12 beautiful minutes and 3 YouTube videos on using a hand churn later, I had about a stick’s worth of butter and over a cup of buttermilk! DD helped me sample as I added salt (1 tsp for a 1 pint container of cream’s worth of butter). She also was a big help churning, but, at 4, her arms got tired quickly.
So that has been my tasty adventure in butter making. I am going to try the hand crank churn again tomorrow or Saturday and will definitely leave the cream out for 3-4 hours first.
So, to any on you out there who are interested in making butter, I would say give it a try. It tastes so much better and really is a lot of fun to make!
by A Farm Girl | Sep 27, 2019 | Family, Musings
We all know the normal way of doing laundry – sort everything according to color: whites, lights, and darks. Years ago, I found it somewhat frustrating to be folding a load of laundry and have to run the folded items to six different rooms. I started thinking about the fact that few, if any, of my clothes ever bled their color and those that did were usually washed separately or with a color catching sheet (one of the best inventions to hit the laundry world). What if I did my laundry by location instead of by type?
I tried it and it worked wonderfully! I now have hampers in various parts of the house and, when those get full, I wash a load for that area. Folding and putting away is much faster because I simply carry the basket of folded items to one place. The kids have a hamper in their bathroom, and all their clothes and towels go into it. When it’s full, I wash a kiddo load. We sort their clothes as we fold them into piles depending on dresser drawer that they go into. Each one has their own small laundry basket, and we stack the piles in the baskets. Then they carry their baskets upstairs and put their clean clothes away themselves. I have a hamper in the kitchen for kitchen towels and bibs (which the kids still ask to wear when dinners are especially messy). The kitchen load gets carried into the kitchen straight out of the dryer and put away as it’s folded or whichever kid is on laundry duty that particular month folds it on the sofa and puts it away Our (meaning the grown-ups) laundry gets split up into a couple of different hampers: delicates (anything that needs a cold, gentle wash and needs to be dried on low); normals (mostly farming clothes that require a heavier wash and can get dried on high: jeans, t-shirts, etc); towels (including the ones from washing the dogs – which happens frequently around here); and the load that we endearingly call “stinkies” (DH’s sweaty undershirts, etc that seem to need hot water and vinegar to come out of the wash smelling fresh). All of our hampers are labeled and in our bathroom closet. I have one more hamper labeled “other” which is a catch all for random things that need washing, like dog blankets and cleaning rags. I wash all of out bedding on Fridays or Saturdays a couple of times each month. I just strip the beds and throw the bedding into the wash, so that doesn’t need a hamper.
So there you go. It’s a new spin on laundry management. Try it and see how it works for you.
by A Farm Girl | Jul 22, 2019 | Farm Life, Recipes
Summer time, has become batch cooking season around here. For anyone who is unfamiliar with the term, batch cooking is making food in large batches and preserving it (usually by freezing) for use at a later date – think soups, stews, etc. With school starting up in August, I will be twice as busy as I have been. When taking farm work, house work, and school time, I have no time (and probably not much energy) left for fixing full dinners during the week. I started thinking about how to make that easier and came up with summer batch cooking.
In late May, I made a list of the dishes that 1. my family likes, 2. were easy to cook on a large scale, and 3. froze well. (Thankfully, with 1 large stand-up freezer, and two fridge freezers, we have plenty of freezer space.) While making this list, I also listed out the ingredients, including quantity, required so that I could buy them when they were on sale.
Here is my list (if you want any of the recipes that aren’t posted, just leave a comment or email me and I will make a post for it):
- Burgers (done with ground venison, ground beef, and ground bacon)
- Chili and Kids’ Chili (done with ground venison and ground beef)
- Taco Meat (done with ground venison and ground beef)
- Taco Soup
- Meatballs (done with ground venison and sausage)
- Meatloaves (done with ground venison and ground beef)
- Lasagnas
- Shredded Pork
- Chicken Stew Meat see my Chicken Stock Recipe
- Prepacked Raw Chicken Boneless Skinless Breasts (yes, I know that this is not technically batch cooking but they so versatile, often on sale, easy to vacuum seal in 2 meal size portions, and it takes 5 minutes to throw them in an oven safe dish with some BBQ sauce for an easy main dish)
- Chicken Pot Pie Filling
- Chicken Stock (see the above link)
- Tortilla Soup
- Beef/Venison Stew
- Minestrone Soup
- Spaghetti Sauce (finally have a good recipe!)
- Potato Soup
- Bean Soup
- Split Pea Soup
- Vegetable Soup
In June and July, I cooked. Then, I vaccuum sealed (yes even soups) using my Food Savor Game Saver (awesome product by the way – the moist food setting is great!) I freeze things on the top shelf of my upstairs freezer on a baking sheet sow they stay flat. Then they are easy to stack in the big freezer in the basement.
At this point, some of you may be cringing at that amount of cooking. It really isn’t that bad and doesn’t really take much longer than fixing a full meal for dinner. Most batch cooking sessions took around 3 hours from start to finish (including time for grinding venison and for cleaning up). Prepping meals for freezing later usually took about 30 min, if I didn’t need to rearrange for better freezer space usage. We also eat some of whatever I batch cooked for dinner that night, so I cut out dinner prep work for that day. Score!
I put the soups in a large stock pot after doing the morning farm work and let them simmer with an occasional stir and taste test until dinner. For shredded pork, I either put it in the Instant Pot (for pork shoulders) or the slow cooker overnight (for pork loins). I also double up and make recipes that use similar ingredients at the same time. Some examples are: taco meat and taco soup, bean and split pea soups, chicken stock and tortilla soup or chicken pot pie filling, and meatloaf and meatballs. I can’t do burgers at the same time as anything else involving ground meat, because my Kitchen Aid will overheat if I try to grind more that about 9 pounds of meat at a time. I buy ground beef, but I have to grind the venison and bacon myself.
Well, there you go. Happy cooking!
by A Farm Girl | May 10, 2019 | Homeschool
We are adding to our list of “H’s” around here. To homesteading and horses we are also adding homeschooling. DS will be starting kindergarten next year and, after much prayer and deliberation, we have decided on homeschooling the kiddos.
I homeschooled while I was going through heavy chemotherapy as a third and fourth grader and again in high school to accommodate a very intense horse showing schedule. For my elementary schooling, my parents just used the program that my normal school was using. In high school, I attended a cottage school 2 days each week and they supplied the curriculum. Now, as I have started looking around for curriculum ideas for my kids, I have been overwhelmed by the number of options. There is sooooo much out there!! It is crazy!
There is also the issue of fitting “everything” in. Our state requires a specific number of total hours of school per year. Within those hours, you must cover mathematics, science, reading, writing, grammar, spelling, history, and civics. At first, I started panicking – how on earth was I going to cover all of that and do all of the farm and house work and not go crazy.
I prayed and researched and prayed and compared and prayed and talked to current homeschooling families and (in case I forgot to mention it) prayed. 🙂 Somewhere in there, I got REALLY overwhelmed! Then I read a tiny book, The Unhurried Homeschooler, by Durenda Wilson. It changed my thinking. I would highly recommend it to any parent and especially to those homeschooling or considering it!! The basic premise of the book is that by slowing down and reassessing what homeschooling really means, we can give our kids a better and more enriching homeschooling experience and a well-rounded education.
After that, I started thinking about what my kids like to do now. They both love workbooks, like beg to do them, and would happily do them everyday. They also love to sit and listen to me read books.
So that’s what we are doing next year. I ordered a bunch of workbooks covering math, spelling, writing, geography, science, etc. for DS and preschool basics for DD and collected a bunch of books for reading aloud together. 4 days each week, after all the morning farm and house chores are done, we are going to spend about an hour doing workbooks with breaks according to their attention spans, followed by one-on-one time to work on hands on math and phonics. (I have to split them up for phonics because DD memorizes things very easily. If I let them do phonics together, she would memorize everything that DS read and then I would have to find new readers for her in a year or so.) So one gets a snack, while the other works with me, then we switch. That should give us about 45 minutes before lunch for music, art, science experiments, or catch up. After lunch, we will snuggle on the couch for 45 minutes to an hour of reading time. Then, free time for the rest of the afternoon! The other week day is open for field trips, group activities, extracurriculars, etc.
Wish me luck!
by A Farm Girl | Mar 29, 2019 | Farm Life
So, DH read my post from 2 nights ago and commented, ” I like it.” Then he laughed, “You seem really put together on your blog.” I laughed back, “Everyone seems really put together on their blogs.”
That got me thinking. When I read other people’s posts about housekeeping or training animals or keeping chickens or homeschooling or raising kids, if I like their ideas, I try to implement them. Then I get frustrated with myself and beat myself up (a lot), because I can’t be so buttoned down as everyone I read about.
For example, I have read a bunch of books and posts that discuss putting housework tasks, laundry, etc all on schedules. If you do x, y, and z every day or on a set day every week, you will never fall behind on your housework, your laundry will never pile up in baskets, your dishes will never pile up in the sink, etc. If that works for those women, more power to them. I like their ideas, but right now in my life, I am lucky if the clothes get washed.
Give yourself grace and remember to laugh.
Try to slow down, at least occasionally.
I have tried putting things into routines and schedules, but, invariably, 3 or 4 days into it, a giant monkey wrench gets thrown in. Then, I won’t be able to get the ball rolling again for weeks. You know what I’m talking about, you finally get all the laundry washed and folded and all the dishes done, then someone (or more than just one) gets sick, the barn floods, the tractor gets stuck in the mud (so you do too), and you have hay and shavings and feed deliveries all within 2 days. You are lucky to keep everyone alive.
At the end of the day, you look at the kitchen and the laundry piles, turn the light off, and go to bed (after crying in the shower for 5 or 10 minutes because you are too tired to think and you feel like a failure for not being able to stay on top of it all). So believe me, I am not that put together. I live in chaos.
There are many mornings when the kids run into our room and get dressed out of the laundry baskets sitting next to my side of the bed. 🙂 I have much more to do than hours in the day. Recently, I added together everything that I “should” be getting done in a week and ended up with enough spare time to sleep for 5 1/2 hours per week – yes, per week not per day.
I can’t cut anything out right now so things get done as I can do them. Sometimes I prioritize, and sometimes I just start with something that I know that I can complete just so I can cross it off my list. I do try to sleep 6 1/2 to 8 hours each night.
So anyone reading this (I am writing this to myself too), give yourself grace and remember to laugh. Try to slow down, at least occasionally. Do a happy dance when the clothes make it back into the drawers, only to have a kiddo throw them out 30 minutes later looking for the perfect shirt. Celebrate when the kitchen looks clean for a minute before you get to make it messy again to love on those in your care. Notice the little victories and cheer wildly for accomplishing them! You are worth celebrating!
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