My friend, Karen, has a fabulous voice and has had a modicum of success in the music industry in Austin, a feat few, apparently, are ever able to achieve.
But here's the deal: She's going to be moving to the country (Virginia) and doing many of the things we do, possibly. But she'll have family around to teach her things we only pick up through the internet, a way that's pretty void of real character. I envy her, envy the generational passing of information that seems suddenly so important in this old world.
But this life is hard - having a full-time job and attempting to start a manufacturing kitchen (didn't I tell you?) and still having so many projects on the burners - front and back, that it seems impossible to think that we could ever accomplish them all. But we must. And we will. But not today.
I can tell you there's not a muscle in my body that isn't sore most of the time, there isn't an animal I haven't cursed for some reason or the other such as eating the wrong species' foods or getting into the front yard when it's not allowed - and there isn't a patch of ground that we haven't explored, thought about or developed on this piece of land. It's hard and it's fabulous. I don't think I'd ever want to go back to the white noise of the city, to listen to the cars outside my front door or the neighbors yelling at their kids. Traffic here consists of riding herd on the goats to get to the barn door. The neighbors are the mockingbirds, the caracaras, the bluebirds that inhabit one of our bird houses, the cardinals always chatting that there's never enough seed left out for them... and the white noise is that of total peace - at least peace as far as having 100 or so animals can be peaceful.
And I can walk around nude and nobody knows but me or Mike. I can rant at the goats for some infraction of rules they don't understand... I mean REALLY scream at them... and no one can hear me - except the goats and the dogs, cats, etc... and they just look at me like I'm insane.
People worry about whether I should get out more or do more social things with friends, but I can't wait to get home from work, to fuss with the geese, goats, guineas, chickens, peafowl, cats, dogs and the rest of the creatures here. And I HATE leaving this place, even to go shopping or do what I must to make a living. It's very difficult to get up and go to work, much less leave this farm for something like social intercourse.
No, dialogs with geese are not as informative as dialogs with those who've watched great movies, have opinions and supposedly a wider world view, or eat out at places I've never heard of. But with the geese, they talk back, tell me that they don't care how I dress or what I say -- as long as I let them get into the pond or let them eat the grass. They intrigue me in ways humans just can't anymore. This is home to them, and we are their keepers. They talk amongst themselves. We just listen.
Enough said.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
two or 28 chickens in every pot
Ah, nothing like chicken slaughtering time to start off the weekend! We had 39 of the 40 chickens we purchased from Callahans.. chickens that we should never have purchased. The woman who would normally sell us chickens was having surgery and this new person innocently asked if we wanted white, red or black Cornish Crosses this time. We chose red. What the heck.. If it's the same quality as the white ones (bred at Texas A&M, I think), then great! Bring them on.
Except that these red hens (crossed with something like an aurecana, certainly not pure anything or cornish crossed with anything else..) are lively, they are sentient creatures, unlike the white ones that basically eat, shit, piss, sleep and eat some more. The white ones that we normally get are barely able to move and are bred to be eaten. The red ones, however, are tough, chewy and not very tasty at all. So we've wasted a whole year's crop, chicken that we love to smoke. This breed will be okay with stews and anything else that tenderizes them beyond recognition, but it's disappointing to not smoke our own chickens this coming year.
This is the second time Callahan's has done us wrong, though. The first time was when they sold us barred rock chickens that were actually half leghorn.. the eggs are white, not brown. The only difference in how the birds look is that a white spot appears on the chicken's ear, marking them from our regular, plump barred rocks. Lesson learned. No more Callahans for this. They get their stock from Ideal Poultry in Texas.
Anyway, so we've put off actually doing the deed to these birds until this past weekend. The biggest saving grace, I'd say, is the new Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker that Mike made from plans he found online. He's pretty handy that way.. coming up with contraptions that make things easier for us. The chicken plucker takes about twenty seconds to de-feather two chickens. This has always been the rudest part of trying to get the processing right for us. Now it's a breeze.
So I caught the red hens and roosters from the chicken coop area... uh, the roosters I caught first because they've begun to crow (something no decent white cornish cross would do.. ever) and if you've ever heard 11 roosters in the morning, even on a farm, you'd feel like doing harm to them, particularly if you're trying to sleep past 5:30 in the morning. On Sunday, the rest of the red hens, after we'd done most of them, disappeared, hiding in the woods behind the barn. I was using a fishing net to capture them two at a time, but some of them flew over the wire that is on top of the fence that surrounds the outside chicken coop, which is a huge space for the amount of birds we have. One of the birds died and we think it had a heart attack. Maybe it saw what we were doing to its mates in the back yard. Hmmm..
It took two days to finish off the birds. I caught them, wrung their necks (Mike helped with the ringing part). Then we let them hang and bleed for a little while. Not much blood in a chicken. Then Mike eviscerated them, removing the bowels, the anus and the lungs (with the gizzards, the fat, etc.) To me, he had the hard part. I was trying to help by chopping off the heads and cutting off the bony calves and feet, along with the necks... The feet and necks were placed in one container of ice so that I could make stock with them... which I did, both days. We wound up with 18 quarts of really thick, wonderful chicken stock.
Then, after letting the chickens rest for a day or so, I took them out of the ice chests and vacuum-sucked them with a Foodsaver device. On Sunday morning, the Foodsaver device worked and then just STOPPED. Luckily Mike was able to fix it and now it runs much better. Usually, appliances that go south just stay south and we have to buy new ones. Not this time.
I collected the gizzards and the livers and, on Sunday, the fat from the chickens and bagged them all separately. The gizzards will be ground up and given to the dogs and cats, the livers made into a pate' and the fat will be used for something tasty down the road.
Oh, yes... and Mike smoked a shoulder roast on Sunday, as well. It was a busy weekend and I'm sore and tired.
The geese are doing great.. and now have their own sleepy-time area in the yard. We put them into this overnight, so that the raccoons and possums don't get them, then let them out to eat grass in the mornings. We are still feeding them chick feed pellets, but they seem to roam around and get what they need from the area. Trying to keep them out of the stock tank for the goats is another matter, however.
Except that these red hens (crossed with something like an aurecana, certainly not pure anything or cornish crossed with anything else..) are lively, they are sentient creatures, unlike the white ones that basically eat, shit, piss, sleep and eat some more. The white ones that we normally get are barely able to move and are bred to be eaten. The red ones, however, are tough, chewy and not very tasty at all. So we've wasted a whole year's crop, chicken that we love to smoke. This breed will be okay with stews and anything else that tenderizes them beyond recognition, but it's disappointing to not smoke our own chickens this coming year.
This is the second time Callahan's has done us wrong, though. The first time was when they sold us barred rock chickens that were actually half leghorn.. the eggs are white, not brown. The only difference in how the birds look is that a white spot appears on the chicken's ear, marking them from our regular, plump barred rocks. Lesson learned. No more Callahans for this. They get their stock from Ideal Poultry in Texas.
Anyway, so we've put off actually doing the deed to these birds until this past weekend. The biggest saving grace, I'd say, is the new Whiz Bang Chicken Plucker that Mike made from plans he found online. He's pretty handy that way.. coming up with contraptions that make things easier for us. The chicken plucker takes about twenty seconds to de-feather two chickens. This has always been the rudest part of trying to get the processing right for us. Now it's a breeze.
So I caught the red hens and roosters from the chicken coop area... uh, the roosters I caught first because they've begun to crow (something no decent white cornish cross would do.. ever) and if you've ever heard 11 roosters in the morning, even on a farm, you'd feel like doing harm to them, particularly if you're trying to sleep past 5:30 in the morning. On Sunday, the rest of the red hens, after we'd done most of them, disappeared, hiding in the woods behind the barn. I was using a fishing net to capture them two at a time, but some of them flew over the wire that is on top of the fence that surrounds the outside chicken coop, which is a huge space for the amount of birds we have. One of the birds died and we think it had a heart attack. Maybe it saw what we were doing to its mates in the back yard. Hmmm..
It took two days to finish off the birds. I caught them, wrung their necks (Mike helped with the ringing part). Then we let them hang and bleed for a little while. Not much blood in a chicken. Then Mike eviscerated them, removing the bowels, the anus and the lungs (with the gizzards, the fat, etc.) To me, he had the hard part. I was trying to help by chopping off the heads and cutting off the bony calves and feet, along with the necks... The feet and necks were placed in one container of ice so that I could make stock with them... which I did, both days. We wound up with 18 quarts of really thick, wonderful chicken stock.
Then, after letting the chickens rest for a day or so, I took them out of the ice chests and vacuum-sucked them with a Foodsaver device. On Sunday morning, the Foodsaver device worked and then just STOPPED. Luckily Mike was able to fix it and now it runs much better. Usually, appliances that go south just stay south and we have to buy new ones. Not this time.
I collected the gizzards and the livers and, on Sunday, the fat from the chickens and bagged them all separately. The gizzards will be ground up and given to the dogs and cats, the livers made into a pate' and the fat will be used for something tasty down the road.
Oh, yes... and Mike smoked a shoulder roast on Sunday, as well. It was a busy weekend and I'm sore and tired.
The geese are doing great.. and now have their own sleepy-time area in the yard. We put them into this overnight, so that the raccoons and possums don't get them, then let them out to eat grass in the mornings. We are still feeding them chick feed pellets, but they seem to roam around and get what they need from the area. Trying to keep them out of the stock tank for the goats is another matter, however.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Long month
The longest months on the face of this earth for me are the summer months. It's Mike's busiest month dealing with his customers and employees who get a bit touchy from time to time. To me, he's an absolute genius at customer service. I don't know how many times I've heard him chatting with irate customers only to turn them around and have them laughing by the time he's finished talking to them. It's truly an art and he's a master at it.
My rental in Corpus needs work. My father left me his house and his debts and mortgage. Luckily, the mortgage is affordable even when there's no rent coming in... like the last few months.
The property manager told us the place needed paint. Boy, that was the least of it. He didn't bother to say it needed a refrigerator, too, as well as a total overhaul as far as maintenance goes. Bad tile, broken doors, door strike plates, bad bathroom fixtures, a broken gate, falling fence boards... you name it. I felt like a slum lord when I saw how bad a condition it was in. So we spent the first two weekends in July in Corpus, away from the farm, working very long days on the house and needing to do a lot more, for sure. We took our refrigerator from the house down to corpus and bought us another one, a fridge-only, for the house. Unfortunately, it took a week to come in and so we had to live out of ice chests for the entire week.
The animals were okay, though, in our absences. We have geese, now, seven of them. They're so cool! They're not quite as loud as most people make them out - at least not yet, but we herd them from their little sheltered area to the back yard and to the pond so they can swim around and act like geese.
We have four 'African' geese (actually Chinese) who have black bills and black backs. The other three are Chinese geese, whatever that means. They're about a month old, now.
I've been absolutely exhausted the last two weeks after coming back and work seems to take it out of me these days, as well.
Finally, today, we got rain from hurricane Dolly that hit the Texas and Mexico coastline and brought that rain north as it veered off to the west inland. I still remember hurricane Celia that hit August 3, 1970. Today, there are many warnings that come from NOAA and other sources and we're all aware of what's coming. In 1970, we had no idea and were in the middle of it, sopping water from the windows and watching things be destroyed around us. My sister watched the garage collapse from the back door and we watched several cars flying through the air. There was only about an hour's warning, if I remember and we were supposed to go to my Grandmother's apartment, but Mom insisted on staying home.
After Celia, we had no electricity for several days. As we had just purchased a half a cow's worth of meat, we served meals in our backyard over open fires and with a camp stove. I remember bathing in cold water and having candles everywhere so we could see what was going on at night. But if you've got a true neighborhood, despite all its problems, people will come together and support each other in these times. That time in that house, long since passed on in ownership, was probably the most memorable time in my childhood.
But back to the farm... Mike fell yesterday, tripping over some wire that was wrapped around a tree at one time to keep it from being ravaged by goats. He fell hard on his side and has had to deal with that while servicing swimming pools for his business. Not a happy Mike.
When we killed the goat for cabrito, we took the fourth stomach (the large one at the bottom) and cut pieces from it to make rennet - about three, one-inch strips. I tried to use the rennet tonight -- after freezing it when we had no fridge.. and it worked! It curdled a cup of milk just fine! And it left whey in its wake just fine! Woo hoo! Now I have over a pint of the rennet for our cheesemaking. Rennet is so expensive, so this will work until we get tired of doing it this way.
It's been a long week, even though I've had several days off, now. Still exhausted and so much to do.
My rental in Corpus needs work. My father left me his house and his debts and mortgage. Luckily, the mortgage is affordable even when there's no rent coming in... like the last few months.
The property manager told us the place needed paint. Boy, that was the least of it. He didn't bother to say it needed a refrigerator, too, as well as a total overhaul as far as maintenance goes. Bad tile, broken doors, door strike plates, bad bathroom fixtures, a broken gate, falling fence boards... you name it. I felt like a slum lord when I saw how bad a condition it was in. So we spent the first two weekends in July in Corpus, away from the farm, working very long days on the house and needing to do a lot more, for sure. We took our refrigerator from the house down to corpus and bought us another one, a fridge-only, for the house. Unfortunately, it took a week to come in and so we had to live out of ice chests for the entire week.
The animals were okay, though, in our absences. We have geese, now, seven of them. They're so cool! They're not quite as loud as most people make them out - at least not yet, but we herd them from their little sheltered area to the back yard and to the pond so they can swim around and act like geese.
We have four 'African' geese (actually Chinese) who have black bills and black backs. The other three are Chinese geese, whatever that means. They're about a month old, now.
I've been absolutely exhausted the last two weeks after coming back and work seems to take it out of me these days, as well.
Finally, today, we got rain from hurricane Dolly that hit the Texas and Mexico coastline and brought that rain north as it veered off to the west inland. I still remember hurricane Celia that hit August 3, 1970. Today, there are many warnings that come from NOAA and other sources and we're all aware of what's coming. In 1970, we had no idea and were in the middle of it, sopping water from the windows and watching things be destroyed around us. My sister watched the garage collapse from the back door and we watched several cars flying through the air. There was only about an hour's warning, if I remember and we were supposed to go to my Grandmother's apartment, but Mom insisted on staying home.
After Celia, we had no electricity for several days. As we had just purchased a half a cow's worth of meat, we served meals in our backyard over open fires and with a camp stove. I remember bathing in cold water and having candles everywhere so we could see what was going on at night. But if you've got a true neighborhood, despite all its problems, people will come together and support each other in these times. That time in that house, long since passed on in ownership, was probably the most memorable time in my childhood.
But back to the farm... Mike fell yesterday, tripping over some wire that was wrapped around a tree at one time to keep it from being ravaged by goats. He fell hard on his side and has had to deal with that while servicing swimming pools for his business. Not a happy Mike.
When we killed the goat for cabrito, we took the fourth stomach (the large one at the bottom) and cut pieces from it to make rennet - about three, one-inch strips. I tried to use the rennet tonight -- after freezing it when we had no fridge.. and it worked! It curdled a cup of milk just fine! And it left whey in its wake just fine! Woo hoo! Now I have over a pint of the rennet for our cheesemaking. Rennet is so expensive, so this will work until we get tired of doing it this way.
It's been a long week, even though I've had several days off, now. Still exhausted and so much to do.
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