The Turkey That Keeps On Giving

The day after Thanksgiving the skies opened up and it began to rain.  A slow, soaking rain that nourished the landscape.  In true feast or famine experiences, rain either refuses to fall (this summer) or comes down in refreshing abundance.  We had plenty of leftovers.  There was not much to do outside.  The options were slim.  So we stayed inside and ate.

Around the back of the house, I have water catchment that enables us to catch over 400 gallons of water with a 1 inch rain.  All of our rainwater reservoirs were overflowing.  You can see one below.  Our cup runneth over.

Look at this big ol' turkey wishbone.  I'm not a superstitious person.  I remember as a kid, we would each grab one side of the wishbone and pull until it broke.  If I recall correctly, the person holding the biggest piece of the wishbone was supposed to be able to make a wish and it would come true.  

One thing I was wishing for is to turn the carcasses of the fried turkey, the baked turkey, and the smoked specklebelly goose into stock.  My wife wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about that venture as it makes a big mess in the kitchen.  The results, however, are well worth it, in my opinion.  We make lots of broth and stock, primarily out of our grassfed beef and chickens.

It's a little different with store-bought fowl as you really don't know what's in the bird.  It's surely not near as healthy for you as the animals that come off your land.  At least the specklebelly goose was wild and we could be sure there was no antibiotics in him.  Stock and broth is really good for you.  It's loaded with nutrients, minerals, protein, amino acids.  It's got collagen which is good for your connective tissue.  Broth and stock is a big booster of your immune system, giving you power to fight off sickness!

So I pulled out the big pot and put the carcasses into the pot with some celery, onions, carrots and herbs.  I added water and got it boiling and then turned it down to low and let it cook for hours and hours.  The next day I heated it up again and then let it come to a luke warm temperature.  I poured through a sieve and captured 12 cups of turkey/goose stock!

We froze it in quart-sized ziploc bags.  We'll use it as a base for soups in this winter season.  I like to use it in place of water when cooking rice.  There were a couple more beneficiaries of the stock-making enterprise other than our family.  I completely picked all the remaining meat and fat from what was left of the carcasses, making sure no bones remained.  This was placed in a big bowl.  Belle, our Great Pyrenees, and Ginger, our cat, will get to enjoy Thanksgiving leftovers for a few more days than their humans.  They like it a lot better than their normal diets.  

Though making broth or stock can be a messy ordeal, resulting in a lot of dishes and countertops to clean, the dividends are great!

Roasted Bones

Now that it is a LITTLE cooler, we feel better about firing up the oven.  First thing on the agenda is to make a little room in the freezer.  We still have the last remaining beef bones from the last bull that we took to the slaughterhouse.  As we discussed a month ago, when we bring a bull to the slaughterhouse, we ask for most everything.  One of the things you get is several bagfuls of bones.

What can you do with bones?  Well, the first thing is use them to make some beef broth.  In past years, we've simply put them on the stove top in a pot full of water and slowly cook for up to two days.  This results in a real nice beef broth.  This time, we are going to kick the broth up a notch or two and ROAST the bones in the oven prior to boiling.

Tricia preheat the oven to 425 and put the bones on a stoneware tray.  She roasted for about 40 minutes. 

Here is a shot of the bones coming out of the oven all roasted.

She put the roasted bones in a dutch oven and covered with water and brought the water to a boil.  Once it came to a boil, Tricia turned down the heat and simmered all day long.

In fact, it is 10 pm and the broth is still simmering.  She'll cook all day tomorrow as well.  The flavors will deepen and intensify.

After another full day of cooking, Tricia will run the beef broth through a strainer.  We'll give the dogs the bones.  As far as the broth, we'll use it in soups, we'll substitute the beef broth for water when cooking rice.  It always makes the rice taste richer, more flavorful.  Tricia mentioned using this broth to make a French Onion Soup in a few days.  Delicious!  That hits the spot on a cool day.

We do have some beef broth in the pantry that we canned in years' past.  However, we have a lot of bones in the freezer, so we'll be making fresh beef broth as often as we need it.  I'm anxious to taste the broth to determine how roasting the bones makes the broth better.

What to Eat on a Cold, Soggy Weekend?

Hey wait, it's not supposed to rain on the weekends, is it?  As a cold, drizzly, non-stop, soaking-rainy weekend enveloped us, there were many questions to be asked: When will it end?  Answer: Monday Night.  Will we see the sun again?  Yes, Tuesday morning. How much rain has fallen?  5.1 inches. Will the church Christmas caroling hayride be cancelled Sunday afternoon?  The hayride was, but we still caroled at two nursing homes and the VA home.

And I wonder, still I wonder, who'll stop the rain? -CCR

But the big question on that Saturday afternoon was: What can we eat that will warm us up both inside and out? Answer: Homemade Chicken Soup.  Good for the body and soul.  Let's get together some fresh ingredients (or fresh frozen: the chopped carrots were blanched and frozen last year.)

The big fat hen was also frozen after we butchered her this past spring.  We had her boiling in the pot for a while, making a nice, rich broth.

I ventured out in the rain to the garden and picked a bunch of Swiss Chard, Kale, Bok Choy, and garlic chives...

The rain washed them down to where I didn't really need to run them under the faucet in the sink to clean them up.

Everything was chopped up and put in the big pot on the stove and allowed to simmer for the better part of the day. Some spiral pasta was added as well. The kitchen warmed up and smelled fantastic.

As a little something extra, Tricia sliced up some homemade corn tortillas, fried them and topped the soup with them.  She also made some cheese toast to eat along with the homemade chicken soup.

A heart-warming and stomach pleasing meal

I'd like to be able to sit here and tell you that I followed the rules of etiquette and ate this soup without slurping, but I wouldn't be being honest with you.  Not only did I slurp, but I tilted the bowl to get the last remaining drops of deliciousness.  It was a good day to eat homemade chicken soup and enjoy a lazy day indoors by the fireplace.

Our Own Grass Fed Beef - Making Bone Broth (Part 5)

Today is the final entry in our series on bringing our grassfed steer to the slaughterhouse for processing and the different things we did in order to use almost every part of the animal except the "Moo."  Before we go further and in the event you missed the previous posts, here they are so that you can click, read and catch up:

Part 1 Grassfed Beef - Organ Meats
Part 2 Grassfed Beef - Picking it Up
Part 3 Grassfed Beef - Rendering Beef Tallow
Part 4 Grassfed Beef - Cooking Grassfed Beef

Today we're going to show you how to make beef bone broth.  As members of the Weston A. Price Foundation, we are firm adherents to the phrase, "Broth is Beautiful."  In fact This Article by Sally Fallon really opened our eyes to the health benefits of cooking with broth.  It seems in our house we always have a pot of our home-raised pastured chicken bones simmering to make that golden, healthy, elixir.  We just never did it with beef bones since we've never had grass fed beef. That ends now!

In the tallow post (Part 3) we told you we asked the butcher to save all of the fat for us.  We also asked him to cut up all the bones and save them as well.  We picked up two HUGE bags of bones for making bone broth and over the next week, we always had 3 pots simmering on the stove.  Here's how we did it.

First, we used a variety of bones, bones with marrow, bones with joints attached, short bones, large bones, you name it.  We had bones strewn across the kitchen.  If we would have had any archaeological experience or were better with jigsaw puzzles, we might have reconstructed the skeleton of the steer right there in our kitchen.

The first of many, many bones

We first trimmed the excess pieces of meat and fat from the bones.  These went into a bowl and became dog food.  Our dogs absolutely loved it and we probably saved $25 bucks alone in dog food. Needless to say, the dogs were as pleased as we were with the grass fed beef.

Scraps for the dogs

We filled 3 large stockpots three-quarters of the way full with bones and set them on top of the stove. These 3 pots and our stove got quite a workout over the next week!

If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen!

We added roughly 3 or 4 tablespoons of apple cider vinegar to each pot.  The vinegar is said to draw the minerals out of the bones.  That's what we are aiming for in order to get the most out of our beef broth.

Adding Apple Cider Vinegar

Then we added filtered water until it covered the level of the bones.  We allowed the bones to just rest there in the water for an hour or so while we cleaned up the mess in the kitchen.

Adding filtered water

Then we brought the water to a rolling boil, skimming off the foam and brown stuff that floated to the top with a spoon and throwing in the compost pile.  Everything goes into the compost pile.

Skimming off the top

We added an onion and plenty of broken up celery and carrots to each pot, covered, and turned down the heat.  We want the contents of the pot to always bubble - a slow simmer.  Then we sort of forgot about it for 24 or so hours.  It just did its thing and we did ours for a day or so.  The long simmer causes the gelatin to be released from the bones, along with the marrow and many minerals.

The bubbling cauldron of health

Finally, it was time to take the broth off of the heat.  I lined a colander with a cut up t-shirt and poured the hot broth through it, to strain out the solids and much of the fat.

Straining the broth

The remnants or debris left in the pot after straining was happily consumed by our dogs and chickens. There is no waste at our house.  It was very interesting how our chickens gathered around the bones and picked at them, actually eating the bone. We give the chickens oyster shells to eat, but they really attacked the bones, picking them clean.

For the dogs & chickens

Once cooled I was able to pour the contents into gallon and half-gallon sized jars.  I left them on the counter until they were room temperature and then I moved them into the refrigerator.  The next morning the contents was gelatinous.  I used a spoon to remove all of the fat that lined the top of the broth.

The first batch of beef broth

Then we poured it all back into a pot, heated it up to a boil and ladled it into quart and pint sized jars and then put them into the pressure canner, pressure canning it at 10 lbs pressure - 20 minutes for pints and 25 minutes for quarts.

When we finished, we had 14 quarts of beef broth:

Quarts of Beef Broth

and 20 pints of beef broth for the pantry.

Pints of beef broth

If my math is correct, that is 6 gallons of beef broth.  That's a lot of health right there.  More than you'll find in a CVS or Walgreens.  Sally Fallon of the Weston Price Foundation says this about broth:

Science validates what our grandmothers knew. Rich homemade chicken broths help cure colds. Stock contains minerals in a form the body can absorb easily—not just calcium but also magnesium, phosphorus, silicon, sulphur and trace minerals. It contains the broken down material from cartilage and tendons–stuff like chondroitin sulphates and glucosamine, now sold as expensive supplements for arthritis and joint pain.

So we are set now for a while and will be able to use the beef broth we made as a base for making soups, using it instead of water for cooking rice, boiling potatoes in or basically using it instead of water for making recipes richer and more flavorful and healthy.  Bon Appetit!

Making Butternut Squash Soup

Now that the days are cool and the weather kind of dreary, overcast and with nightfall coming earlier, comfort foods are king.  Things like gumbo, chili, beef and vegetable soup, stews, rice & gravy, etc. provide nourishment and warmth.  After a long day, sitting down to a plate or bowl of any of the items I mentioned above is filling and satisfying.

One of the things we've added to our repertoire is Butternut Squash Soup.  My butternut squash crop was a total bust this year.  It grew and sent out long vines and flowered like crazy, but the squash on them either didn't set or they grew to about four inches long and withered and rotted.  I'll try again next year.  Since we didn't have a harvest, we did the next best thing and purchased a case of organic butternut squash from Azure Standard, a co-op we belong to.

So let's make some butternut squash soup!  As you can see I've cut the squash in half and seeded them.  I'm saving the seeds to plant next year.  Perhaps this will be a better batch.  I'm also going to add some composted cow and chicken manure to add some richness to the soil in the raised beds where I plant my vining squash.

Cut the squash in half and scoop out the seeds

Now we'll arrange the squash, 'meat-side' down in a baking pan with water on the bottom and put in an oven set at 350 for about 30 minutes.  

Baking the squash

When the timer goes off, we remove them from the oven and allow to cool for a bit until we can handle them without burning our fingers.  The flesh of the butternut squash is a beautiful golden-orange color.

Lovin' from the oven

Now we'll get a spoon and scoop out every last bit of the squash from the hard rind of the butternut squash.  It doesn't take long and pretty soon you'll have a big pile of squash which will serve as the base of your soup. 

Removing the squash from the rind

Meanwhile, in a stock pot, get 2 Tablespoons of butter, two cloves garlic minced, and once cup of onions sauteing. 

While the butter, garlic and onions are getting "happy" in the pot, we picked some jalapenos and some carrots (1/2 cup sliced) from the garden and began slicing them up.

Processing some fresh veggies

We added the carrots and peppers to the pot along with a half teaspoon of ground cumin, a half teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of pepper.

All the veggies in the pot, except for the squash

Earlier in the day, Tricia took one of our chickens out of the freezer and began to boil it.  After a long while, it rendered some nice, rich, health-inducing chicken broth.  We added 1 cup of the beautiful broth to the veggies in the stock pot and cook until the carrots are soft.

Adding chicken broth to the stock pot

All the carrots, onions, garlic, butter, peppers, and seasonings now get poured into the food processor and we run it until the contents are processed.

We then put the butternut squash into the food processor and pureed it until it was a creamy consistency.  Don't worry about washing the food processor.  It'll all be together in a minute.

Pureeing the squash

We poured the pureed squash into a dutch oven.

We poured an additional three cups of our chicken broth into the dutch oven that contained the squash.

Broth added to squash

Now we go ahead and add the pureed carrot/broth mixture to the squash in the dutch oven and stir it all up to incorporate the flavors.  Then heat it all up.

All coming together

Once the soup is nice and hot, turn it off and add 1/4 cup of some fresh heavy cream from the jersey cows and stir it up.

The cream of the crop

Now all we need is a ladle, a bowl, a spoon, and some fresh cut up parsley to garnish the top.

Homemade Butternut Squash Soup

It is so creamy and delicious.  While it tastes like something you got a a fancy restaurant, the fact is - it's a simple dish with only a few wholesome ingredients that anyone can make at home.  Make up a pot of homemade butternut squash soup. Your taste buds will thank you.

A Chicken in Every Pot

Subtitle: Inflationary Populism

Huey P. Long was the 40th Governor of the State of Louisiana and was a United States Senator until he was assassinated in the State Capitol Building.  When Benjamin was there the other day for the Home School Field trip to the Raw Milk debate before the Agriculture Committee, he saw the hole in the marble that remains to this day from one of the gunshots that took "The Kingfish's" life.  Huey P. Long was a populist and ran on the slogan "Every Man a King" and his "Share the Wealth" Program.  He was a very colorful figure and liked to criss-cross the State appealing to the common folk and campaigned using the promise, "A Chicken in Every Pot!"

Image Credit

The "Kingfish" was a populist indeed and as a result he pitted the people against the elite.  He was a fiery talker and made lots of campaign promises including 'a chicken in every pot' and 'a car in every garage'. He was a polarizing figure.  Some people really loved him and some hated him.  I thought this quote (from http://www.hueylong.com/perspectives/huey-long-quotes.php) was interesting:

He has not only common ways, but a common, sordid, dirty soul." His face betrayed that he had the qualities of the lower animals: "the greed and coarseness of the swine, the cunning of the fox, the venom of the snake, the cruel cowardice of the skulking hyena."

— Mrs. Ruffin Pleasant, former First Lady of Louisiana

Wow!  That's some strong words, spoken in a most civilized manner!  But, how in the world does a story about Huey P. Long relate to farming, you ask?  Well, when I came home from work today, I opened the door and could smell chicken cooking. Tricia was outside and I walked over to the stove and opened the lid to the pot.  This is what greeted me:

A Chicken (Foot) in Every Pot!?

You know that a dollar doesn't buy what it used to.  Inflation has really kicked in and devalued our dollar. When Huey P. Long made that promise back in 1935, this is all his promise would be worth today - A Chicken foot in Every Pot.  To be more accurate, it would only be a chicken TOENAIL in every pot!

That is not too appetizing, is it?  The old Cajuns when they butchered a hog used to say that they use everything except the "oink" and that's almost how we are with chickens.  We boil the feet (cleaned of course) and wouldn't you know it makes a lovely broth that serves as the base of soups, gumbos, rice or anything else that you'd normally use water for cooking, you substitute broth.  It makes things richer and more flavorful.  Of course we don't leave the feet in there.  They get fed to our dogs. The dogs love 'em, but Tricia worries that they might take a liking to chicken feet and try to eat them off of live chickens.  I hope not!

Broth is Beautiful

I think if he was still around, ol' Huey P. Long would've taken of his hat, hung his Seersucker suit coat on our coat rack, and sat down and enjoyed some Chicken Foot Broth with us, lamenting over the fact that the elites were 'eating high on the hog' while we were stuck with the scraps.

That's okay with us.  Waste not, want not.  

Broth is Beautiful

We are members of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  This non-profit is a group that disseminates the research of Dr. Weston Price, a nutrition pioneer, who studied isolated non-industrialized peoples, their health and diet.  Dr. Price's research showed that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.

Reading their research opened our eyes to the flaws in the American diet, full of processed foods.  One of the quotes they use is: "Broth is beautiful."  They say that grandmother knew best.  Back in "the day", nothing went to waste.  When an animal was butchered, the bones, tough meat, carcass, etc. went in the stock pot and was boiled to make stock.  Today we buy boneless cuts of meat and eat fast food and broth is seldom, if ever, made.  That's a shame.  There are healing properties in broth.  Why do you think it was always said that chicken soup cures a cold?

We make broth at least once a week and use it in soups, gravies, rice, etc.  We use it in place of water in cooking and it adds more flavor and nutrition to each and every dish.  Here's how we do it:

We pull one of our pastured meat birds that we butchered out of the freezer.  It all starts here.  Pastured poultry makes better broth.  Pour some water into a pot. 

Place your cut up bird into the stock pot with the water:

Bring to a boil, skimming off the top as it cooks.  Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 6 - 8 hours, the longer, the better.  You can then remove the chicken, let cool, debone it and use in chicken salad or any other dish.

Strain the broth into a container and put into the refrigerator.  The fat will rise to the top and congeal.  You can pour the broth into serving size containers to keep in your refrigerator or freezer to use in many different dishes.

Mix this delicious broth with fresh vegetables from the garden for a great soup.  Use broth instead of water to cook rice for rice that is rich in flavor.  Not only delicious, but nutritious, too.  It contains minerals that are easily absorbed by the body.  It also has the broken down cartilage and tendons that you pay a lot for in supplement form for arthritis relief and joint pain.
  

Broth is Beautiful