Spring Farm Work

Spring brings about a lot of changes and chores around the farm. One of the bigger chores for me was pulling a fence line through the overgrown hedgerow on one side of our property. The previous owners had a fence in there at one time but never maintained it, and every time it became overgrown they would just put in new t-posts. This limited the amount of usable pasture that we had access to and made it difficult to allow the goats to browse the hedgerow since I had no way of containing them on the other side. Starting late winter I began the task of chopping a path through the wild olive, rosa multiflora, Chinese sumac, and honeysuckle that is our hedgerow. The culmination was on Easter Sunday when I was finally able to put in the field fencing.


It is hard to see here but if you click on the image to enlarge it you can see that the fence line goes through the hedgerow just in front of the larger trees on the hill behind the mobile chicken coop. The weather was beautiful on Sunday (warm but not hot and plenty of sun) and Julia came out and helped me put the finishing touches on the fence. She stood at one end of the last pull and told me where to place the t-posts so that the were in a nice straight line. Jules was a great help and when we were policing up all the tools and getting ready to go in she told me that this was the best Easter ever since she got to find an Easter basket, got a new game and DVD and got to spend time with me. Well I had to agree that it was a pretty great Easter after she told me that.

Spring also brings about the start of barbecue season on our farm. For Easter this year I barbecued up a beef brisket for the first time. The whole family is fond of pulled pork so I did more or less the same recipe. First I give it a dry rub consisting of paprika, chili pepper, garlic and salt. Put it on the grill with the coals off to the side and cover with the lid. After 8 hours, periodically turning, mopping with a mixture of oil, white vinegar and tabasco, and adding coals to keep the temperature the meat is done.

Since I was in charge of cooking, and was also doing the fencing we ended up having a carnivores delight dinner. The entire meal consisted of the beef brisket, rolls, BBQ sauce and beer. The kids of course got to choose their own beverage but seemed to really like the meat. I am sure it is not the healthiest way to eat and I would not want to do it all the time, but after a long weekend of fencing gorging myself on beef and beer was pretty great.

Hope everyone had a good start to Spring.

Goat Curry

Since winter has set in I decided to spice things up by trying some new recipes. As I blogged about here I butchered our Nigerian Dwarf Goat wether earlier this fall. At the time we grilled up some of the tenderloin and enjoyed it, but since then the goat meat has just been sitting in the deep freeze. Not just wanting to do beef recipes with goat I went to the largest cookbook in existence, the web. Typing goat stew into Google brought me to a Caribbean Goat Stew recipe that sounded interesting. I followed the recipe fairly faithfully except for omitting the tomatoes since we obviously do not have any fresh ones. I could have pulled some frozen ones out of the freezer but I was being lazy. The resulting stew was great (if I do say so myself) but what was even better was that everyone ate it. Now my kids are very adventurous eaters, but I would not have been surprised if they had passed on this meal. The curry gave it a nice kick, but did not make it too spicy for the kids. The funny thing is that everyone liked the meat, it was the potatoes and carrots that were not as well received. They came out as I would have expected and as I have had in other Indian Curries, but Danielle thought it would be better with vegetables cooked separately with a different flavoring. Truth be told she is not much for stew, or mushy vegetables. I knew that she really did like the goat though when she mentioned making the curried meat but with a different side dish later this week.

I find I get great enjoyment out of my kids eating food that I raised and prepared myself. My dad used to tell me something similar when I was a kid but I did not appreciate it until I had kids of my own. I guess that is always the case.

Holiday Feast

A couple days after Christmas my mother, father, sister and nephew drove down from New Jersey to celebrate the holidays. I took the opportunity to try out, so to speak, one of my new presents. Danielle got me The River Cottage Meat Book for Christmas this year.

This book is a wonderful combination of political/social commentary on food production, cooking theory, recipes as well as gorgeous pictures and humorous anecdotes. It is truly a coffee table book with a message, and being a new farmer/foodie I am all ears. I was already planning to make prime rib since we had some in the deep freeze from last years side of beef, and figured this would be a great occassion to try out my first recipe from the book. I cooked up two prime rib roasts since neither seemed big enough for the 5 adults and 4 children who would be eating dinner.

Fairly simple recipe for the beef, rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, cook for 30 minutes under high heat to brown the outside then slow cook until done. Hugh, the author of the book, stresses that all roasted meat needs to rest for a minimum of 30 minutes for best results. Actually, the way he talks about it, you are committing a mortal sin if you don't let the meat rest. So while the meat was resting we took some of the drippings and made some Yorkshire Pudding (also from a recipe in the book).

I had never had Yorkshire Pudding so was not really sure as what to expect. There really is not much in Yorkshire Pudding, the recipe called for just flour, milk, water, salt and eggs. It did call for 4 eggs plus 2 more egg yolks which makes it quite decedent. The pudding puffed up nicely as you can see above, and the meat was thankful for the rest.

We also had mashed potatoes, gravy, and a green salad from our garden to round out the meal. Below is some of the dinner party.


My daughters were dressed up as fairies, and my son was too hot from playing with his cousin to wear a shirt, we have a very relaxed dress code at Chez Kushmerick. My nephew and sister are also in the picture, arguably much more appropriately dressed. Long story short the dinner and company was excellent and too many bottles of wine were consumed, exactly how I like to spend the holidays. The Yorkshire Pudding was a huge success, and based on the way it disappeared I foresee making it again soon.

Hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday full of good food and friends.

Another Birthday

This past weekend it was my turn to celebrate getting another year older. I had a most enjoyable weekend, highlighted by some fabulous food. You may notice that regardless of the occasion we celebrate with food. I had at least two birthday dinners, one Sunday and one yesterday on my actual birthday. On Sunday Danielle made homemade sundried tomato fettuccini topped with alfredo sauce. I put together and fried up some crabcakes which she served over a bed of sauted greens. All this with some homemade chiabata bread and a glass (or two or ...) of red wine made for a wonderful gastronomical experience.


Last night we made a much more "normal" meal. Rotisserie (farm raised) chicken with grilled olive tomatoes over the remaining sundried tomato fettuccini, sauted string beans and foccacia bread. As Danielle pointed out in a recent post, this is why we farm, and also why we gain weight in the winter.


We had a lot of great food but the highlight of my birthday celebration has to be the birthday video-card that my kids sent me.

Happy Brithday

This past weekend was Danielle's birthday. No I am not going to tell you how old she is, you do not get to be married for 12 years without learning some things. Much if not all of our celebrations (birthdays, holidays, etc.) are organized around food and this one is no different. Eggs Benedict is Danielle's favorite breakfast. In fact she would probably be happy to eat it for any meal of the day. This time it was special since we were able to make the entire meal from our own farm produce. The bacon was from our first round of pigs, the eggs were fresh from the hens and the potatoes were grown this spring. Even the herbs and berries were grown on the farm. The only things not produced locally was the English muffins, the butter in the sauce and the salt and pepper.


The weather was gorgeous and we enjoyed Danielle's birthday brunch out on the patio, although the mimosas destroyed my productivity for the rest of the day.


Happy Birthday Honey!

Labor Day Farm Feast

What do you get when you put together farm raised baby back ribs


with corn and beans right out of the garden?


A delicious Labor Day meal.


The whole family enjoyed the feast,


although the kids were disappointed that the nice large watermelon we picked was still not ripe.


Maybe the watermelons will be ready by October!

First Corn!!!

Nothing like the first sweet corn to make you remember why we are doing all this. Lack of rain has really been depressing and making this entire endeavor more difficult than last year, but the taste of the first corn fresh from our garden makes it all seem worthwhile.


Last night I grilled up some New York strip steaks from Legacy Manor Farm, and some fresh zucchini from our garden and had a delicious local dinner.

Early Father's Day Gift

Danielle is horrible about keeping secrets, and thus when my Father's day present arrived last week she showed it to me right away. She bought me the grill for Father's day 4 or 5 years ago, so it only seemed fitting to get the matching rotisserie. You can't see it in this picture but there is a small electric motor that mounts on the right side of the spit and an adjustable counterbalance that goes on the left side. We defrosted a free range chicken and I have to say the it came out even better than my beer can chicken. Since it is always rotating the bird essentially self bastes. We had a salad with greens out of our garden as well as some homemade bread to accompany the chicken. We are already looking forward to doing one of our heritage turkeys and maybe even a suckling pig on the spit.

Ribs!

The picture above says it all. Danielle picked up the pork from the butchers on Wednesday and we have been eating it almost constantly. The kids tried some pork chops the night she brought everything home and liked them so much that Sam requested to have more on Friday night. This weekend my parents were down so I barbecued up a couple racks of ribs and we made some more chops. It was quite the feast. Emily my oldest has already requested that I barbecue up a pork shoulder for her birthday, the kids really love the pulled pork. Danielle is salt curing the bacons and hams and my only disappointment is that I will have to wait up to 6 months for the ham. I must say that all this good eating is making me forget how much trouble we had getting the pigs to the butcher.

Thanksgiving Turkey

As my wife is fond of saying, we started Thanksgiving dinner last Easter by setting 18 Narragansett turkey eggs into an incubator. From those 18 eggs we only had three turkeys make it to maturity one of which was white (not the proper coloring for a Naragansett).
We augmented our flock with two birds from Springfield Farm to make sure that we would have a breading pair.

All told we ended up with three Toms one Hen and the aforementioned white. In order to allow the bird to age appropriately and to avoid grossing out some house guests I processed one of the Toms and the white one the weekend before Thanksgiving. After plucking and cleaning our Tom weighed in at ten and a half pounds. The white went into the deep freezer and will be dinner sometime this winter.

On Thanksgiving we also cooked a store bought thirteen pound bird, to ensure leftovers and placate my mother who was somewhat leery of eating our homegrown bird. While our bird was a few pounds smaller it was considerably taller (our turkey is on the left).

All said and done the turkey was delicious and it was great that the potatoes and beans were also grown on our farm.

An Accidental Dinner

Our chickens like to go into the goat stall during the day to root around through the straw for food as well as to just hunker down out of the weather. Some had gotten in the habit of jumping up on-top of the corner hay feeder. This was not a problem when it was full of hay other than the fact that they tended to spill some of it, but one day the feeder was empty and one of our Delaware's managed to fall down into the feeder and get herself stuck. Not sure how long she was like this but upon removing her it was clear she could not walk. Danielle hoped that she was just in shock so she isolated her and gave her some food and a electrolyte solution.

After a couple of days it was clear that she was not going to recover so I culled her. Not really wanting to take the time to pluck all her feathers I instead just skinned her. It was apparent when butchering her that she had broken her one leg and had a significant amount of internal injuries. It ended up that I was only able to salvage the two hind quarters and one breast. After letting the meat age for a few days in the refrigerator I made what turned out to be a delightful dinner -- if I do say so myself. I first browned the chicken on the stove top with some butter and onions. Then added some chicken stock to deglaze the pan and baked it with some fresh rosemary from the garden. Served over some farmstyle home fries made with our own red potatoes it was quite a treat.

We have since removed the corner feeders from all of our stalls, but this definitely seems like an example of making lemonade from lemons.

First Corn Harvest

Well I have to admit with all of the problems I was having with the deer that I was considering not growing corn next year. Forget that! Last night we harvested some corn from our first planting and it had to be the best corn I ever tasted. Mind you I am extremely biased but my family seemed to enjoy it also. I originally picked five ears so that everyone could have a taste. That was not nearly sufficient so Julia and I went back out to the field to get some more. While we were out there she decided that we should pick a couple extra ears since she wanted some for lunch today. Julia and I ended up eating three ears each. I have to admit it made me really happy to have the corn go over so big.



Needless to say I will definitely be planting corn again next year.