At least the chickens are happy…..

August 12, 2020 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

This seems like an awfully small amount of soup for all the deseeding, chopping, cooking, pureeing, and dirty dishes, but the chickens are ecstatic about the bowl of seeds they received this morning. Now the soup does taste good and nowhere near as sweet as canned soup (how much sugar do they add anyway?), and it’s made from tomatoes and basil from my garden, but it’s barely enough for me, never mind both of us! I guess I’ll need at least 6 pounds of tomatoes next time — and I need a better mixture of tomato plants next year so that I have some large tomatoes!

Last week’s batches of butternut squash soup and leek-and-potato soup were much more satisfying with about the same amount of time yielding multiple jars of each. The squash is from my brother-on-law’s garden and the leeks from the grocery store. I also have canned and frozen squash for winter, so we’ll have some healthy options for quite some time.

The summer garden seems to be fading, and my thoughts are turning to fall and winter crops. Carrots worked well last year, and I’m going to add spinach and lettuce. I remember spiders crawling our of spinach that a friend in Germany gave me, and I remember small slugs on the lettuce on school lunches, but I’m trying hard to not let my mind go there! We’re setting up an outside sink to wash veggies before they come inside, so that should solve some of the problems.

We did finally get to harvest honey in late July. We have a lot less than last year, but that seems to be a problem across Georgia and even my friend’s hives in England. We strained our honey into three buckets and each tasted very different: one was similar to last year’s, one had a spicy undertone, and the other was a little lemony. They are all mixed together in the keg right now and we’ll start bottling soon. The pollen and nectar dearths are definitely on, but the bees are still doing well. We are supplemental feeding to build their strength up before the fall nectar flow and hope to go into winter with strong hives full of natural resources.

The chickens may be happy with all the tomato, squash, and melon seeds they are getting, but they are not happy enough to give us any eggs yet! They are checking out the nesting boxes and have started kicking the fake eggs out, so I guess that’s progress. Their combs and wattles are red, and they are making even more noise than usual, so all the signs are there, just no eggs….. As they are hiding the fake eggs from me, I don’t even have the millisecond of excitement from seeing them twice a day before realizing what they are. At least I no longer get excited over seeing the golf balls!

Houdini, the kitten that adopted us and escapes cages, is finally letting us touch her so long as food is involved. She happily plays with both dogs, but keeps her distance from the other cats. The dogs love playing together, but remain a little jealous when it comes to sharing their people with each other. Belle is learning the house rules, but still just has to chew on a wooden spoon or something to remind us that puppies are impulsive.

Hubby is already back at work, albeit closer to home, and I will soon have to adjust to not spending all my days on the farm. Equal parts of me look forward to seeing my students again and long to just stay home with the critters and the garden. My body has been getting plenty of exercise, but it will be good for my brain to start doing some mental gymnastics again! Life is good on the farm, but I do love my job….

Cooking · Lazer Creek Apiary · Relaxing

Sachertorte – second attempt

November 26, 2019 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

20191126_Sachertorte It’s that time of year ago — time to open up the cookbooks and use family members as guinea pigs for new holiday recipes! Last night’s Sachertorte was more like a Sacher-pancake. It had the chewy consistency of a cake-like Brownie, but Hubby enjoyed it. At least the second attempt rose in the oven and looks pretty good except for some overly brown bits on the bottom and sides. I guess I should have adjusted the oven temperature to accommodate the switch from too-big cake pan to smaller glass dish. Regardless, it is done, and covered in chocolate, and I know my family will eat it even if it would evoke negative-but-friendly comments on The Great British Baking Show. The final step is to write “Sachertorte” on top with melted milk chocolate, but I’m going to quit while I’m ahead! It’s not like my handwriting is overly legible when I’m writing with a pen, never mind with a piping bag. This is a recipe that is better sliced a day or two after baking, so it was a good one to start with.

20191126_SRolls This morning’s sausage rolls (BBC Food recipe) were more successful than either version of Sachertorte. The rolls that survive the first hour actually taste better cold, but we usually can’t resist them when they come out of the oven. I was going to make a second batch, but Hubby just called to say the frozen puff pastry is sold out, and I have no desire to make my own today. I actually don’t think I’ve made my own since high school cookery class! I stopped making my own pastry after moving to the U.S. because it was just awful. Now I know that European butter contains less water and more fat, so I can blame my made-in-American dry and crumbly pastry on American butter — at least until I give it another try with European butter that is now available here. But that’s not happening this week….

As we only like turkey in small doses and have no desire to have a lot of it hanging around after Thursday, we’re having beef for Thanksgiving. And not just any beef — Italian Pot Roast (Stracotto) from The Joy of Cooking. We love this recipe, but it involves reducing red wine and beef stock down a couple of times which takes time and has in the past made a huge mess on and around the stove. It’s hard to boil 2 cups of liquid down to half a cup without some splatter, and red wine stains so very badly. It may be worth getting my deep pressure cooker from storage to use for that stage — or to be more patient simmering away at the sauce over a lower temperature. You also have to be careful to keep your face away from the pot as inhaling the fumes from a total of 2 1/2 cups of wine can make one quite light-headed. Maybe that’s why I made such a mess the first time I cooked it!

Another favorite beef recipe of ours is Coastal Bend Texas Beef Tenderloin from Better Home and Gardens. The downside to that one is that the whole refrigerator will reek of garlic for the 24 hours I allow it to marinate, but it sure does taste good. The salsa is the perfect complement to the beef as well as to other recipes.

I am going to try one more new recipe from Mary Berry’s Baking Bible tomorrow: Austrian Curd Cheesecake. European desserts are generally less sweet than their American counterparts, and I always enjoyed German cheesecake recipes. Well, there was one that didn’t set and just burst out of the shell and flooded the table…. that was not the best birthday cake I ever made for my daughter! I hope that the Mary Berry recipe will be a good substitute for my favorite recipes until I find my German cookery books which will probably stayed boxed up in storage until after we build the house.

I always like to think that I’d enjoy cooking this much if I just had more time, but summers prove me wrong. I enjoy cooking for family get-togethers, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m much rather be outside working with the bees or gardening. I guess I need to be excited about seeing friends and family to voluntarily slave away at a stove.

Cooking · Home Remedies · Honey · Lazer Creek Apiary · Natural Food Sources · Pests - Bees · Products and Vendors

Our biggest harvest yet – 95 lbs of honey.

June 1, 2019 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

Spring was good to us with its profusion of blackberry blossoms which yielded hives full of pale and delicious honey. We put our daughter and her boyfriend, JI, in bee suits for the first time and had them smoking and brushing bees, which they greatly enjoyed. (I’m glad that I was the only one who got stung on their first excursion to the bee yard! I even restrained my remarks to the bee that crawled up my boot. )

We only checked honey supers above excluders and were still able to pull 95 pounds of honey. There are full supers with frames that were 3/4 capped last weekend, so we’ll have more to process in the near future.

As the workshop is still in disarray, we extracted the honey in the kitchen with the four of us working very well together in the cramped space. JI is a natural at decapping frames and we all took turns cranking the handle on the extractor. I’d covered the island with a sheet and put towels down on the floor, so clean up was a breeze. With water and electricity at the shop now, we were able to pressure wash the equipment. I even had enough energy left to pressure-wash the wood ware that I plan to repaint sometime this week. (Or do I mean next week? What day is it? I love summer break!)

The main nectar source right now appears to be elderberry, and the bees are still visiting buckwheat early in the day. I’m very happy to see them on the lavender, but I don’t yet have enough lavender for it to make a difference. I just read that varroa mites don’t like the way lavender smells, so lavender pollen and nectar can help protect bees. (Source: Plants for honey bees) That makes me want to go out and clip more cuttings right now, but I need to wait a while as the plants are currently in full bloom.

Honey May 2019 — My first attempt at lavender-infused honey.

I did cut some blooms a couple of days ago for my first attempt at making lavender infused honey. I know I need more, but I really want to leave as many flowers on the plant for bee-forage as possible. Some of the recipes I looked at require heating the honey, which I prefer not to do, so I am following a recipe from NectarApothecary.com that takes 4 – 6 weeks. I do not have dried blooms, so I know there’s a risk that fresh flowers will make the honey crystallize, but I’m not worried about that as I plan to add it to tea or simply eat it by the spoonful when I have a sore throat! I know I’m not supposed to disturb the honey, but I can’t resist taking the lid off to inhale the incredible aroma now and then. It’s only a matter of time before I dunk a teaspoon in, so there may not be much left in the jar by the end of the six weeks….

Today we get to find a home (other than the living room) for the Honey Keg and pour our liquid gold into it for storage and eventual easy bottling. I couldn’t find my mason jars and lids the other day, so it may be time to just have a case of pre-sterilized containers shipped in. Our previous process of ladling honey into jars in the kitchen sink is going to take too long, but I’m not going to complain about how much honey we have. After all, our progress means we’re one step closer to being able to retire from our day jobs!

It’s another beautiful day on the farm, and we finally have a chance of rain in the forecast. Cucumbers, grapes, blackberries, and tomatoes are all getting closer to being edible. We got to eat four incredible blueberries from one of the new bushes yesterday. The workshop passed the building inspection yesterday. Best of all — we no longer have to worry about what is going on with our old house and can now focus on framing the honey shop in the workshop. It just simply doesn’t get any better than this!

Construction · Cooking · Lazer Creek Apiary

Oops – I did it again! Food processor woes.

August 13, 2017August 13, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

At the end of July, I had 4 pounds of very ripe figs ready to process into jam and could not get the lid to my food processor to seat. At first I thought it was too early in the morning, so I polished my glasses, took another gulp of coffee, and tried again. After struggling with it for another five minutes and feeling like a fool, I looked at the top of the bowl and saw that it was no longer perfectly round! With all those figs waiting and us trying to get ready to head back to the farm, I took the easy way out and headed to Target to buy a replacement for the food processor that had served me well for well over 10 years. Why did this happen? The answer to that lay in the booklet that came with the new one — don’t wash the bowl on a sani-rinse cycle. I’d never done that before because I usually have my jars washing before I start slicing and dicing, but with the kitchen counter replacement, I was doing things out of order.

I made two batches of jam using my shiny new food processor and happily headed back to the woods and stayed there until a multi-day forecast of 80% rain! I came home and harvested the last of the figs and got ready to make a new batch. Once again I was dealing with a lid that didn’t fit and once again the bowl is no longer round. However, this time I know that I did not wash the bowl on a sani-cycle, so I’m not very happy about my purchase. I’m still waiting to hear back from the manufacturer about why replacement bowls are not available.

The jam I made with that batch of figs tastes good, but as I resorted to pureeing the figs in the blender before making fig and blueberry jam, it just doesn’t look as appetizing as when the figs are in chunks. Now we’re at the point of the year where I look forward to having more pantry space so that we don’t have to store jam and honey in odd places around the kitchen and dining room. Maybe next year we’ll be able to start the foundation for the new house….

New countertop and sink — New counter-top and sink

Still, it is a joy to cook in my kitchen with its shiny new counter tops and stain resistant sink. Even the blackberry and blueberry juices wiped right off. We painted the floors of the base cabinets when we replaced the counter tops, so much of this week was about putting shelf paper down and putting everything away. Instead of just putting stuff back where it’s been for the past 15 years, I tried to put things away where they made more sense. We’ll see how well that plan works as we try to find stuff over the next few weeks!

So, on Tuesday, Farmerella and her Prince Charming turn back into teachers, but we’re returning as relaxed, inspired, and excited teachers for our 8th year until retirement! We have to get used to alarm clocks instead of sunrises and walking on the treadmill instead of walking down to unlock the gate in the mornings, but my recent reading and hubby’s two seminars this summer have us burgeoning with new ways to present material, and that is invigorating. It’s going to be a good year!

Cooking · Lazer Creek Apiary

A Good Thermometer is Hard to Find

July 17, 2017 Lazer Creek ApiaryLeave a comment

One of my main frustrations with cooking with sugar, whether it be jam or fondant for the bees, is the inconsistency of the texture of the final product. I know I have to get this right before I’m ready to start selling any jams. I’m now on my fourth thermometer and finally both batches of jam I made are exactly the firmness that I’ve been aiming for all this time.

I’ve been using the metal candy thermometers that clip to the side of the pot with varying results. Even on the best batches, the jams were not as firm as I wanted until I used the above Thermobib thermometer. I made two batches of jam this week and both are the same consistency.

The jam in the picture is spiced apple and fig jam. It’s probably a little more chunky than most people would prefer, but I like to taste pieces of apple in the jams I make for us. It is a simple recipe – 1 pound of figs, 1 pound of Granny Smith apples, 4 cups of sugar, 1 cup of water, 1 teaspoon coarse salt, 1 tablespoon of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of nutmeg. I chop the figs first and cover them with a cup of sugar and the salt to draw some of the moisture out of the figs. Then I peel, core, and chop the apples, add them to the fig mixture and dump the rest of the sugar and the spices on top. When the figs have been resting for at least 30 minutes, I add the water and a strip of the apple peel, and bring the mixture to a boil while constantly stirring. It needs to stay at a rolling boil for a minute or two and then it’s a matter of just boiling enough moisture out to reach the magic temperature of 220 degrees. Remove the strip of apple peel before ladling the mixture into jars. (The pectin in the peel helps the jam set and the rest of the peel makes a nice, healthy snack while cooking!)

I used a recipe from Delicious magazine for the blackberry apple jam, with the modification of boiling the blackberries in the water first and then straining out the pulp and seeds through muslin. This is a good option for people who need to avoid seeds. Personally, I just don’t like having to get the seeds out from between my teeth! As posted in a previous blog, I’d already boiled the blackberries when I picked them at the farm, so it was just a matter of defrosting them and warming them through a little before straining them. I chopped the apples a little finer for this batch.

At the end of “cooking day,” we had two batches of jam from new recipes and had bottled 33 pounds of honey. I love seeing the purple of the blackberry jam and the gold of the spring honey with the sun behind it.

One other recipe I tried this week was figs in honey. I don’t know if the flavors will integrate over time, but this is a recipe that I would only make for family in the future as it uses too much honey for us the market it. I do want to try Roasted Figs in Honey as an ice-cream topping sometime, but again just for family. Sometimes we just need to enjoy what our fig tree provides for us without turning it into jam first!

I’m very happy to say that these were the last recipes I tried on our old, boring, beige counter-tops and that I am looking forward to cooking in our almost-updated kitchen. More about that in the near future…..

Canning · Cooking · Farmers · Lazer Creek Apiary · Pests - General

Hunter-gatherers

June 23, 2017 Lazer Creek Apiary1 Comment

Yesterday, I temporarily deferred my equal rights ideologies and stepped back (way back) into a hunter-gatherer role, trailing along behind the man of the house, picking berries while he did the manly task!

There are so many beautiful ripe blackberries on our property, but they are so hard to get to. At the best of times, wild blackberries demand a blood sacrifice, so I am always weighing the pain-versus-gain factor. Since my last blackberry harvest, BIL sent us a picture of a timber rattle snake up under one of his blueberry bushes, edging back into some wild blackberries, so that made me even more cautious.

Then, hubby came along and cleared a strip along one of the really good blackberry patches with the bush hog, giving me much easier access — still not pain free, but easier. By following in his wake, I was able to harvest 1 1/2 quarts of beautiful, juicy blackberries which I then washed, boiled, and froze so that I can turn them into jam when we’re back in the city. As a few family members need to avoid seeds and the rest of us don’t really enjoy picking seeds out of our teeth, I’ll strain them and then press the rest of the juice out of them before adding apples and making blackberry-apple jam. I cheated last year and bought frozen blackberries for a trial batch, but that jam was good enough to make me want to harvest what nature has provided for us here.

Of course the other side of the hunter-gatherer equation is the hunter. I guess hubby was hunting undergrowth when he cleared those paths for me, but his other hunting chores yesterday involved getting rid of the critters that have been bugging me! We discovered that the yellow jackets at the gate had actually moved into the gate through a drain hole, so it’s no surprise that they became irritable when we rattled the chain against their home. They are now in an afterlife of some kind. We avoid using pesticides whenever possible, but we can’t have yellow jackets attacking guests or us at the gate. His other accomplishment led to one more restless night followed by a good night’s sleep as two field mice have now been evicted from under the kitchen sink. There’s a huge hole cut into the back of the cabinet, and we thoroughly spray-foamed that, but that didn’t stop them. There’s another hole cut in the side of the cabinet to let the drain pipe go through. We’re hesitant to put spray foam in there because we don’t want it on the back of the oven, but we’ll seal it up with aluminum foil after we’re sure there are no more mice romping around in the walls. We’re generally believers in the if-you-kill-it-eat-it philosophy, but I draw the line at making mouse and yellow-jacket casserole. (Actually, I draw the line well before that — there’s still too much suburb in me to eat possum or squirrel, although I did LOVE the dove hubby hunted last fall.)

Even though I spent much of the day taking on more-than-usual traditional female tasks, I did start the day having fun on our new Kubota tractor! I have been hesitant to bush hog on borrowed tractors, even though BIL and our neighbor have shown more confidence in my abilities than I’ve believed myself to have, but I quite quickly became comfortable on relatively flat land knowing that if I damaged something, it would be something I was paying for! I even found it easier to back the tractor up than to back my car up because I can see where I’m going so much better. However, that became tricky after a while because of my on-going neck discomfort (I can’t call it pain right now) and my bi-focals. While bi-focals are great for many things, they don’t work well for looking back over one’s shoulder or for checking bee hives. I have an eye appointment next week and will probably get a pair of long-distance glasses and a pair with which I can see bee frames. I’m not sure how I’ll juggle three different pairs of glasses — maybe the eye doctor will have a better suggestion!

Our other exciting 15 minutes yesterday was when we had to combat a waterfall running down the inside of the RV door! Hubby made adjustments to the strike plate for the door latch and that kept the rain out, but in the time that took, the torrent filled a casserole dish and soaked a bunch of towels. (I wish I had a picture to post, but we were both a little too occupied to grab a camera!) It’s times like these that make me glad I brought every old towel that we had at the house here. Sure, they take up space, but sometimes they come in handy. We started today with a trip to the laundromat and that led to reorganizing towel storage — what better time to do it than when every towel in the house has just been washed?

It’s a beautiful sunny day, the trails we cut last year are now trails again, and we can see the stakes for the house-site again. Life is good on the farm!