Big Brunch in a Little Town

Our oldest son, Russ, invited us to go eat brunch at a restaurant in the little town of Arnaudville, LA.  The population of Arnaudville is 999.  You read that right.  But it this small town, they have a big-time restaurant.  It's called The little BIG Cup.  We arrived around 10 AM anxious to enjoy a great meal with family in a neat locale.

We decided to get the breakfast brunch.  The menu is unbelievable.  I'll list what we got:

Chicken and Smoked Sausage Gumbo
Fresh Baked Buttermilk Biscuits with white sausage gravy

Fresh fruit, garden salad

Creme brulee French Toast

Egg Frittata

Applewood Smoked Bacon

Breakfast sausage

Stone ground grits

Praline Chicken & Waffles

Pork Butt and Smoked sausage jambalaya

Pork backbone stew

Pork ribs

Fried hog cracklins

boudin

hot coffee

Did we ever eat!  You are looked at two satisfied diners!

The restaurant is in a very old building and it sits on the banks of Bayou Teche.  It is landscaped and decorated very nicely.  There are even tables to eat outside on the patio/dock.

I guess if you wanted to, you could paddle your pirogue, working up your appetite and tie up on the dock and go eat a great meal.  

After we had eaten and had a real nice visit and taken in all the sights and sounds of Arnaudville, Louisiana, it was time to head back home.

What a special morning spent with some of the special people in my life!  I'd highly recommend making reservations at Little Big Cup.  Bring the special people in your life and bring a big appetite!

The Dairy Daily Diary

Tonight I'll bring you up to date with what's going on with the milking operations at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.  We're milking one cow (LuLu) and two goats.  We drink all we can and sell the rest.  Despite the high heat LuLu, our Jersey cow, yields rich milk, high in butterfat.  Look at the cream line in that gallon jar of milk!  The cream rises to the top and almost a third of it is heavy cream - perfect for butter or whipped cream, excellent in coffee or for making ice cream.

I walked out in the pasture in the late afternoon.  Cows aren't super smart, but they aren't super dumb most of the time, either.  Notice how Rosie and Elsie are grazing in the shade.  They follow the shade out and wait until the shadows lengthen before they move on out.  Belle is guarding her charge, too.

LuLu is grazing by herself, but she's following the same protocol.  She'll move on out as the shadows lengthen.

Here is Rosie in the foreground.  She is 18 years old!  She is the first Jersey calf born on our property.  She was a champion show cow in her time and gave us many wonderful calves over the years.  Her time is getting short, however, and we'll have to make some hard decisions soon.

Here's Elsie.  She's a bossy beast, if there ever was one.  She is still a heifer.  She should have calved two years ago.  We had the veterinarian come and check her out when she never got pregnant.  He found a cyst on her ovary and got rid of it.  She was going into heat every cycle, but still never got pregnant.  She's a fat, good looking Jersey, but if she's only going to eat and not give us calves and milk, well... the clock is ticking for you Elsie, girl.  The pressure is on.

We'll see.  We haven't seen her go in heat for the last several cycles and Tricia seems to think her udder is showing some changes.  Is hope on the horizon for this heifer?  Funny, I pray every single morning that our cows get pregnant.  As I said, we'll see...

And this is LuLu.  I call her LuLu Boofaloo.  She has been in milk now for two years come July.  That's a long time to be milking a cow.  We need a break and she does too.  We plan on drying her off on July 4th.  Independence Day (in more ways than one.)  We've seen her milk production really fall off.  It could be the heat or the time in milk, but it could be that she's bred, too.  We will find out in due time.

Here is the bull.  Nicky.  He's a registered Jersey like Rosie, Elsie, and LuLu.  He, hopefully, has planted his fertile seed.  When the girls had not gotten pregnant, I had talked to a neighbor down the road.  He has a Holstein Jersey cross.  He wants to trade me his bull for Nicky.  That way we'd learn if Nicky is "hot" or fertile.  Introducing a bull with Holstein would make calves with more volume.  Holsteins give more milk, but Jerseys give richer milk.  I'm thinking we'll just keep Nicky, but if he's not going to be successful in his breeding endeavors, we'll make necessary adjustments.  We send our bulls to be processed to fill our freezer and it's pretty empty right now.

The pasture is holding up pretty good right now, thanks to the lime Dad and I broadcast in the early spring as well as the wonderful rains we have been getting.  Cows head down is something you like to see.  Later, when they sit, chewing their cud, you know they are happy creatures.

That's gonna be a wrap in the Dairy Daily Diary.  

Putting up Salsa

Growing up, we ate a lot of ketchup - on french fries, on fish sticks, you name it, we poured ketchup on it. In 1991 something happened, sales of salsa in American households overtook ketchup, and we've never looked back.  Today, we don't even have a bottle of ketchup in the house, although there are a few packs of it in the fridge leftover from the few times that we go to fast food restaurants.

When we have a decent tomato crop (we didn't last year), we try to put up some salsa in pint jars.  We grow a wide variety of heirloom tomatoes: Black Krim, Cherokee Purple, Pink Brandywine, Organic Rainbow Blend, Black Tomatoes, Creole, Chadwick Cherry, Mortgage Lifter and Black Vernissage.  My two favorites are probably Black Krim and Chadwick Cherry.  They give us a nice mix of colors and flavors that go well in salsa.

We chopped onions, grated garlic, sliced up a bunch of cilantro and diced jalapenos, anaheims, and hot banana peppers:

We blanch the tomatoes and slice the skins off and cut out the cores.

Here's a big bowl of just blanched tomatoes.  You can see the skins are wrinkled and ready to be removed.

All the cut up tomatoes and vegetables are thrown in a big pot.

I wish you could smell this as it starts to cook.  We have so much in the pot, we keep a close eye on it as we don't want it boiling over!

We ladle the salsa in the pints with a canning funnel and can the pints of salsa following the canning instructions and then pull them out.  We set them on a towel and listen intently for the crisp "POP!" as each one seals.  When the last one seals, our job is done.  17 jars for the first batch.

It's beautiful salsa from homegrown ingredients.

How fast will 17 jars disappear?

A Second Chance

 “For a righteous man may fall seven times and rise again, but the wicked shall fall by calamity.”  Proverbs 24:16

I like that proverb.  It's all about not giving up.  It's about rising after you've fallen (everyone falls), dusting yourself off and moving forward, learning from your mistakes and trusting in God.  God uses imperfect instruments to accomplish His purposes.  He uses the foolish and weak so that He gets the glory and not man.

Second Chances.  I'm glad God is a God of second chances.  Many times things don't work out the way you planned, but we trust in Him that He has the best plan.  I was thinking about this today and how this plays out in nature as well as in our lives.

On January 1 of each year, I plant tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant from seed into little six pack seed pots.  I plant them into a seed starting mix that I make with equal parts topsoil, composted wood chips, and composted chicken litter.  As the seedlings grow, I water them with diluted fish emulsion.  I plant two seeds in each pot and as they grow, I separate them into individual pots prior to transplanting in the soil.

Some of the seeds don't germinate.  That is to be expected, especially when I'm using saved seed or seed that's a few years old.  I dump all the rich dirt from those pots in which the seeds didn't germinate into a bigger pot to reuse later.  In fact, here's one now:

I'll use that dirt for planting other crops in.  In six pots, I've got some herbs growing, specifically French Sorrel.  The leaves on this plant are so tasty!  This afternoon while watering the sorrel, something caught my eye.  I'm pointing at it, in case you don't see it.

It's a tomato seedling!  And it's doggone healthy.  These were seeds that were planted on January 1 and for whatever reason, didn't germinate.  But here we are almost six months later and conditions changed that allowed the seed to germinate.  And it's growing!  And here's another one:

And another!:

And two more!:

All in all there are seven tomato seedlings of unknow variety that were unsuccessful in growing the first time they had a chance.  Their peers passed them by, seasons changed, their time was up...  And yet, they got a second chance and by golly, they're growing.  A new lease on life.  There's a lesson there for us.  Maybe we're late bloomers, maybe we have failure after failure, but don't give up.  Stay rooted in the fertile soil (of God's Word) and grow!

I'm going to re-pot these tomato plants and nurture them.  It is a little early for the fall crop of tomatoes.  If nighttime temperatures are above 75 degrees, you run the risk of the pollen being sterile and the fruit won't set.  I generally plant my fall crop about a month or so later.  But these plants want to grow.  We'll use this as an experiment and see how our "Second Chance" variety of heirloom tomatoes fare.

Broody Hens

We have 8 nesting boxes in our hen house.  Nine if you count the milkcrate with hay in it on the floor.  It's an overflow nesting box, and it's a good thing we have it.  Right now we have 5 hens that are broody.  Here are four of them right here:

Broody hens have gotten the motherly instincts.  They want to sit on their eggs and incubate them.  The incubation period is 21 days.  Broody hens, during this time, may stop laying eggs.  The trouble is, we have 40-something laying hens right now, with another 13 in a chicken tractor that we hatched out in our incubator from our fertilized eggs.  We don't need additional chicks at this time, so I reach under these hens each afternoon and snatch the eggs from beneath them.  They are very protective of their clutch of eggs during this stage, and they always fluff their bodies up and peck my fingers as I reach underneath them.  They don't like this at all!

They sit on their nests all day long in the sweltering heat.  I've moved water tubs into the hen house so that they can have water when they need it.  Most things I've read say that a hen will "break" her broodiness after 21 days, but we don't always see this happen.  Their biological clock is ticking and they desire to hatch out some babies.  Some of the broody hens sit on NO eggs.  Others are sitting on a chalk egg that we have in the box to deal with rat snake problems.  They don't know what they are sitting on.  They just want to sit.

This would be a perfect time to just put 8 or so eggs underneath each one, but we don't need anymore baby chicks for our flock.  We are gathering, on average, about 22 eggs each day.  We eat all we can, keep our kids and family members stocked with fresh eggs and sell the rest.  One of the things we've been eating for lunch is egg salad sandwiches.  I'm not a big fan of mayonnaise, but my wife makes homemade mayonnaise that is good, so she'll boil some eggs, cut them up, add olive salad mix and salt and pepper and serve over some toasted sourdough bread for an open-faced sandwich.  We enjoy that for lunch.

Hopefully, at some point soon, the broody hens will be broken and will once again be out on the pasture foraging in the grass for bugs and worms.

Picking Tomatoes at the Breaker Stage

I've been gardening for a long time, but learn new things virtually every day.  I'm going to share something with you that has made a big difference in our tomato quality.  For too long, I was snookered into believing that the best tomatoes are those that ripen on the vine.  You see all the marketing on canned tomato labels that say "Vine Ripened Tomatoes."  So naturally, I would leave my tomatoes on the vine to ripen.

Well, several things happen.  It rains a torrential downpour and by the time you go to pick them, they've split.  Or worse than that, we have huge problems in our area with stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs.  If you leave your tomatoes on the vine, the tomatoes get damaged by these pesky pests.  Here are some of those dreaded stink bugs here:

So what's a gardener to do?  You pick them at the breaker, or break-over, stage.  Right when the tomatoes start to "blush," pick them and bring them inside.

Is it tricky?  Absolutely.  Sometimes you leave them one extra day and they've ripened past the optimal point of picking.  It's not an exact science, but an art.  I don't always get it right.  

I bring them inside and put them on big trays where they'll continue to ripen to perfection.  One day they look like this:

And the next, they're ALMOST to perfection.  As you can tell with the tomato at the 6 o'clock position, I waited a day too long and the rains came and the tomato split open.

What we've seen since implementing this, is higher quality tomatoes and we haven't sacrificed any taste.  The tomatoes ripen on their own off of the vine.  If you want to call them vine ripened tomatoes, that probably falls in the little white lie category, although you might argue that they were ripening on the vine, you just picked them before they were totally ripe.  Research tomato breaker stage and aim to start picking them when they start to blush.  If you don't already do this, I think you'll be pleased with the results.

Walk-around Wednesday

We had Worship Service this afternoon at one of the nursing homes in town.  It was a nice time.  Our little church always enjoys visiting there, singing old hymns, praying, and opening the Word of God.  It was a 'sweet' time.  The Bible compares the Word of God to being priceless and sweet:

More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much fine gold: sweeter also than honey and the honeycomb.  Psalm 19:10

Speaking of honeycomb, one of our milk customers dropped by to pick up his milk and had a sweet treat for us.  He had just returned from Mittie, Louisiana, where he got some honeycomb just dripping with honey.  We are eating this by the spoonful, and it's not gonna last too long.

The second thing I saw today is that the two rows of cowpeas I planted are popping up nicely.  I have one row of purple hull peas and one row of black-eyed peas that we planted in the garden in the side yard where we had just harvested Irish Potatoes.  They seem to thrive in the heat and humidity.  The only thing that affects them are aphids, but I've got some neem oil ready to go when I see them on the plants.  I've bordered the pea patch with sunflowers.

Just to the north of the peas, I planted Cinderella pumpkins, Peanut Pumpkins and New England Sugar Pie Pumpkins along with some assorted gourds.  They aren't up yet.  This planting is an experiment because the seeds are old (2017) and were saved from some pumpkins my parents brought back from a trip to South Dakota.  I planted a lot of seeds on each hill, assuming that since they're old, the germination might not be too good.  We'll watch and see what happens.

Finally, I wanted to show you a basket of peppers we picked.  It is my new favorite variety.  They're called Shishito Peppers.  I'll show you next week a delicious recipe that we found for them.  

We'll talk again tomorrow night.