Monster Shitake

Year three and the shitake logs are going strong.  I pulled a 10" mushroom still fresh off one of our hickory logs.  Commercial shitakes are grown on oak, which wind up with the strong tannic taste characteristic in Oriental recipes.  The hickory produces a mild nutty taste, perfect for the venison pot pie they found themselves in.

After yesterday's haul, the next batch should be ready in a couple days.

New Piglets

Our Berkshire piglets have arrived!  About a month ago we bought a pregnant Berk sow (Dolly) to pair up with our boar Sirius Black.  The plan is to mate the gilts from this litter with Sirius once they get old enough.  This litter produced two healthy girls and four boars.

Dolly's Piglets

In another month or so we'll introduce Dolly to the rest of Sirius' herd.

Watchful Mom

Goose Mousse with Cherry

This recipe is a fantastic meld of flavors, perfect for a fall appetizer.  The delicate flavor of the goose liver is complemented by hints of cherry and the coarsely chopped goose meat, which is a very rich poultry.  We raised our geese outside with none of the force feeding techniques required for a true fois gras. As a result the fat content on the liver is a bit lower, but they are still delicate, mild and delicious. The goose tenderloins were removed from breasts used for Goose Proscuitto and are the loose thin strips that separate easily from the main breast meat.  This is the most tender cut from a bird.

The recipe should take about 30-45 minutes to prepare and is best made a day in advance of serving so the flavors can meld and develop and the mousse can solidify.  The recipe calls for lard for sauteing, which can easily be substituted with butter.  Our lard comes from our Ossabaw Island Pigs and is a bit healthier than butter due to the higher percentage of unsaturated fats, not to mention it is more stable at high temperatures as there are no milk solids to burn.  I can't speak for lard from the supermarket as I've never tried it, but from the Ossabaw Island Pig it's delicious.

12 oz. Goose Liver or Fois Gras

4 Goose Tenderloins or 2 oz Goose Meat

8 Oz. Butter (One Stick, Room Temperature)

4 Tbs Lard or Butter

2 Shallots

1/4 Cup Dried Cherries

1/2 Cup Sherry

1/2 Cup Heavy Cream

1 tsp. Salt

Pepper to taste

1. Soak the cherries in sherry for a minimum of 2 hours.  Drain the cherries and reserve the sherry in a small bowl. Squeeze the cherries to remove as much liquid as possible.
2. Dice shallots and saute in medium heat in 1 tsp lard until translucent.  Scoop out cooked shallots and transfer to food processor. 
3. Add 1 tsp lard to the pan and saute goose tenderloins until lightly browned and cooked through, but still moist – about 3 to 5 minutes.  Set the tenderloins aside to cool. 
4. Add the remaining lard and saute the goose liver for 5 minutes, turning half way through.  Remove the livers and set aside to cool to room temperature or place in fridge. 
5. Pour the reserved sherry into the pan and scrape up the drippings.   Reduce slightly, but don’t burn off all of the alcohol and pour back into the bowl.  You can also deglaze the pan in ½ the sherry and reserve the remaining amount at full strength.
6. Add the livers and butter to shallots in the food processor and pulse, adding the reserve sherry mix and cream until light and fluffy.  Add salt and pepper to taste.  Make sure all of the ingredients are room temperature, otherwise the butter may melt and separate later.  
7. Coarsely chop the cherries and the tenderloin and add to the food processor.  Pulse for 1-2 seconds to work in to the mousse, but no longer.  Ideally, you should have small bits of cherry and meat that add a hint of texture to the spread.
8. Transfer the mousse to ramekins or small bowls and refrigerate.  Extra ramekins can be frozen for later use.
9. Serve chilled with crackers.

Quintessential Fall Evening

Creative Problem Solving

As a technologist and an IT engineer at heart, I have developed a real passion for solving problems and figuring out ways to make things efficient.  Farm projects provide a lot of opportunity for this and are a great hobby for keeping these skills sharp.

So here's problem number one.  The builder of our house put the pressure tank for the well and the associated plumbing in a small shed, which we call the pump house.  I think the reason for this was to reduce the Summer humidity in the house by keeping the condensation buildup on the tank in a separate building.

Pump House

Unfortunately, this also means another space that needs to be heated in the winter, which we've done with space heaters and electric pipe warmers, an expensive and risky approach.  Last year I tried just going with the pipe warmers and in the middle of preparing Christmas Eve dinner we had a sudden drop in water pressure.  After some inside troubleshooting I trudged through two feet of snow to find the pump house flooded and water spraying everywhere from a burst pipe because of a failed warmer.  Some quick pipe sweating and dinner was back on track, but the moist warm environment ended up becoming a neon sign for Norway Rats, who proceeded to tear apart the fiberglass insulation throughout the shed.

Problem number two is that we've been pretty lax with our layer chickens and they've gone pretty much rogue.  They've scattered themselves around the property and have taken to sleeping in the trees.  They have also found alternative spots for laying eggs and I haven't been able to track them down, except for stumbling on an occasional nest, which we won't use.  At some point I'll take on capturing the birds and confining them to the portable coop to "train" them to lay in the box, but sometimes it's as easy to start with some fresh chicks.

A while back I found a clutch of eggs in the woods and threw these and a few others in the incubator.  When they hatched, the pump house got cleaned out and the brooder relocated inside.

Blue Pressure Tank & Brooder

The heat lamp needs to be on for the chicks, why not have it do double duty and eliminate the need for the other heaters in the pump house?  So far it's working great and we'll have a fresh batch of layers producing in the Spring.  I wish I had thought of this last year.

On the Road

I travel quite a bit for my career, which makes tending the farm very much a shared responsibility.  I'm currently in Chicago getting ready for a client visit in the morning and in between attending conference calls, churning through emails and squeezing out a deliverables, my thoughts stray home here and there.

I was delighted to get the report back from the home front this evening that my 7 year old daughter Jayla has been diligently taking care of the animals both morning and evening.  That's a lot of feed to hand out and water to refill and she's doing it voluntarily.  I'm very proud of her.

I'm very thankful that Ayala has always been willing to take care of farm responsibilities and deal with the challenges that inevitably come up around the property.  I've lost count of the times she's had to go collect the pigs, lock up the goats, take stock of predator losses with the birds, and probably the most gruesome dealing with the burned up chicken coop.  It wouldn't be possible without that support and I would probably have given up long ago.

here we go

So, I received the e-mail invite this morning to join John on this new blogging venture. He wants to blog about our "farm" and we thought it would be interesting to hear both of our voices as we document/discuss/describe this aspect of our life. I am very tired this am as I am still harboring trace rogue elements of this cold and we got in late after a very fun [and long overdue] evening hanging out with our friends the McIntyre's. It is an abso-freakin-lutely gorgeous fall day -- PERFECT-- weather. So of course we are all indecisive and ambivalent about how to spend it... and now it is 12:30 and we are still basically just puttering around. Though I think I did hear the thunk ... thunk ... thunk that may be John chopping wood out back.

I've done the blogging thing many times over the last decade... different ones for different purposes. The only one that has had any real continuity is my private one at LJ. So we shall see if this one "takes." I like the idea of sharing it with John. Intriguing for several reasons. Though I don't anticipate my entries being as "farm" focused as his are. We shall see...

One thought. When I clicked over on the e-mail link to officially join this blog as an author, and I saw the design John had set up, my first thought was: "whoa, where did he steal that photo from?" It captured such a lovely pastoral feel, I was sure he ganked it from some other site. And then I realized that it was a photo of our own place, and our own drive, and our own geese. Hmmm... I don't think I fully realize how nice we have it here.