One of Our Favorite Options for an Abundance of Cabbage

We've either eaten or processed most of the cabbage crop.  We still have 3 heads in the fridge and 3 heads still growing in the garden that I need to harvest this afternoon.  As the weather warms, we find that snails get into the cabbage and eat them.  Coleslaw has been standard fare for over a month now.  We also made four quarts of kimchi (Korean sauerkraut).  We also have been eating a cabbage & sausage jambalaya, which is really deconstructed cabbage rolls.  We also made a batch or two of eggrolls, but thought we'd make a bunch of eggrolls and then individually freeze them, so that we can pull out a few at a time to eat over the coming months.  Who doesn't like a delicious, quick meal?

I didn't capture step by step instructions as I remembered that we had done that several years ago.  However, when I searched the blog, I found this: Post from 13 Years Ago  Unfortunately, the photos are gone!  The recipe and steps are still there, though.  Making eggrolls seemed, initially, to be something outside of our expertise and comfort level, but making them/rolling them is a process that you pick up fast.  

So here is a photo of our egg roll filling all made up.  It contains shredded cabbage and carrots and seasoned ground meat, but the filling is up to you.  We've made them with mushrooms or chicken.

We set up a little assembly line in the kitchen, laying out the egg roll wrappers, putting two heaping scoops of filling into the center and rolling them up.  We line them up like little soldiers until the oil is hot and ready for frying.

We use coconut oil or beef tallow for frying.  The eggrolls are dunked in the oil and a spoon is used to roll them around until all sides are golden brown.

When done, we pull them out and arrange on paper towels to absorb the excess oil.

When you get in the groove, you can really get things going in a smooth, efficient process.

In this instance, I was rolling them and Tricia was frying.  As soon as she had some coming out of the oil, I had some waiting in line to be fried.

We allowed the eggrolls to completely cool and then arranged them on baking trays.  Our objective was to put them in the deep freeze and freeze them individually, so that they don't stick together and we could take out one eggroll for a snack or 10 or 20 at a time for a meal.  We learned that if you don't individually freeze them, the oil makes them stick together and when you try to remove them, they'll tear.  This process fixes the sticking together/tearing.  Into the freezer all of the trays of eggrolls went...

Once completely frozen, we removed each one and stacked into several Rubbermaid containers, sealed them and placed them back in the freezer.  Here is one of the containers:

We ended up making just about 60 eggrolls!  We'll likely make more as we do have 6 more heads of cabbage to do something with.  This will work out nicely.  With a little preparation and planning on the front end, we now will have quick, delicious meals at our convenience.  All we need to do is take out however many we want and warm them up.  Pass the soy sauce, please!

Filling the Deep Freeze With Meat

In our post ON DECEMBER 20, 2020 we talked about bring our two bulls to be processed at Elliot's Slaughterhouse in Morse, Louisiana.  After being slaughtered the meat is dry-aged and then cut/processed according to the instructions we shared in the post from December.  They package, label, and freeze the meat and then call us to go pick it up.  My wifey made the short drive in the pickup truck and brought it home.

She actually made a couple of trips, first filling the deep freeze at our house and then filling the one at Russ' house.  Here are photos of the meat picked up and brought to our house prior to fitting it into our freezers.  The bags are huge!  It doesn't look like much meat, but it is.  Here is the ground meat, steaks, roasts, ribs, etc.:

Here is a big bag of bones:

Here is a big bag of fat.  (More on this bag tomorrow)

So, it is a shame that we don't have a scale to weigh the animals prior to slaughter.  That would really tell the story.  But what we have is interesting nonetheless.  

Clarabull, we estimate, weighed 725 pounds.  He yielded 284 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging.  Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge for butchering him was $75 and debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Aussie, we estimate, weighed 775 pounds. He yielded 310 pounds hanging weight after shrinkage from dry aging. Processing cost $0.49 per pound.  The charge from butchering him was $75 and the debris (liver, heart, tongue, ox tail) was $12.

Total cost + tax was $486.35.  Taking the cost of processing divided by pounds of retail cuts of meat gives us an average cost of $1.14 per pound.

For comparative purposes, the cost of butchering back in 2017 was $25 and $0.43 per pound of hanging weight.  The cost of butchering this year (2020) was $75 and $0.49 per pound.

Now that we have almost 600 pounds of beef in the freezer from our bulls and 47 Cornish Cross Meat Birds in the freezer, we are seriously considering investing in a generator.  It would be a tragedy to have a power outage and lose that meat!  We have an addendum to this post tomorrow.  Stay tuned!

As We Near Drying Off the Cows - An Experiment

In four days we will be drying off the cows.  In dairy-speak that means we stop milking them.  You'll probably hear us talk about that a lot.  We've been milking for over two years straight without a break, and we are ready.  When we bring the milk inside, we pour it from our stainless steel pails into gallon-sized glass jars.

Those jars are immediately refrigerated and the cream rises to the top.  I remember being young and my teachers would always tell us, "Work hard, prepare yourself, for the cream always rises to the top."  That saying may sound strange to some, but it is a truism.  The cream is the best part of the milk.  It is the thickest, sweetest, best part.  After it rises, we take a big spoon and skim off the cream, putting it into a pint-sized jar.  We use that for our coffee, and for ice cream, and for whipped cream and butter.

But soon, we'll have no more fresh milk for a while.  For how long?  We don't know.  We haven't had the cows palpated yet to see how far along in their pregnancies they are.  We were talking about what we were going to do.  Sometimes, in the past when the cows were dried off, we wouldn't even buy milk.  We would only buy cream. 

Tricia reminded me that my Mom had given us a neat thing that was from Bumby, my grandma.  It was some little glass jars to freeze sweet cream in.  See the photo below?:  Freezer Creamer - Always have cream for unexpected guests.  Thaws while your coffee brews.  Slips into your ice cube tray.

There are six little jars with lids on a tray.  I couldn't find a date on these, but I think it is a neat family heirloom.  We are going to see if we can successfully freeze some cream using Bumby's antique sweet cream jars.  (One is missing because I'm about to fill it.)

I simply filled the jar with sweet cream from Clarabelle's milk from earlier in the morning.  It doesn't get fresher than this!

I placed the little cap on top of the jar...

And I placed it in the freezer.

I pulled the little jar out a bit later to find that the cream had completely frozen. 

I think our experiment was successful, but the proof will be in the pudding.  We'll thaw out and drink in our coffee this weekend.  If it is good, we'll make more, and we'll ration the remaining sweet cream for special coffee time!  I hope it works.  The last time we dried off the cows, we tried to freeze some milk.  I was not impressed.  Once it thawed, it had a different texture and consistency.  I was not a fan.  Perhaps this will be different.

Cutting up the Meat Birds

We left off on Tuesday after the chicken butchering was done.  Well, it's not exactly done.  We still need to cut them up and put them in the freezer.  While the freshly butchered birds go through rigor mortis, chilling in cool water, we take a break for a few hours.  I use that opportunity to re-sharpen the knives.  My Chicago Cutlery knives do a great job, but they must be razor sharp to keep taking the abuse they take.  When we cut up the chickens, we'll be cutting through bone - on 47 birds!

Here is our first bird.  We weigh each bird (more on that later) and label a gallon-sized freezer bag with the weight and the date.  We are now ready to cut.  We use a variation of the typical 8-piece cut up that yields two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings, and two breasts.  Except we add the neck and backbone and then cut the breast in half.

I was going to do step-by-step, but my hands get too messy (and we have a lot of birds to cut up).  the first thing I do is slit the skin between the thigh and the carcass.

After cutting the drums, thighs, wings, neck and backbone off, we're left with the breast.  I heart chicken!

Here is a photo of the 8 piece cut up ready to go in the bag but before I cut the breasts in half.

After all are cut up and bagged, we put them on ice in two ice chests.  We've learned not to overwhelm our deep freezers.  While leaving the rest on ice, we put a few in the freezer and allow them to freeze.  Then we add a few more.  And so on and so forth until they are all in the freezer.

Here they are.  47 birds in the deep freeze.

We've also learned to put t-shirts between each bag so that we can pull out individual bags of chicken.  If you don't do this, you have to get a crow bar and a hammer to get a bag of chicken out for supper!

In our next post, we'll look at the numbers.  How did we compare in total pounds harvested over last year?  What about cost per bird?  Fatality rate?  Feed cost per bird?  Well, we'll find out the answer to those questions and others as we look at the numbers.  Bon Jour!

Picking Up the Meat

Several weeks ago we brought one of our bulls to the slaughterhouse in a neighboring town.  They butchered the bull and then dry-aged him for two weeks before cutting him up.  We don't have a scale, so we don't know his "on the hoof" weight, but we have a pretty good idea based on the receipt.  The receipt below shows a 284 pound hanging weight.  The difference between live weight and hanging weight is the blood, hide, hoofs, internal organs, lungs and heart.  A good rule of thumb is that the hanging weight is 40% of the live weight.  So this tells us that the live weight must have been in the neighborhood of 710 pounds.

You'll see there is a $0.45 per pound charge, plus a $50 butcher feel, plus a $12 fee to process the debris.  $189.80 plus taxes of $16.50, results in a total charge of $206.51.  That's a lot of money, but then again, it's a lot of meat.

After the bull was butchered, they packaged it and asked us to wait a couple days for it to get frozen solid.  Tricia arrived and there were about six wire baskets of meat ready for her.

The meat was all in a big walk in freezer along with everyone else's meat.  It was labeled and organized.

The ground meat, steaks, briskets, ribs, roasts, liver, tongue, fat, bones, and debris were individually wrapped and also put in big heavy-duty plastic bags.  They filled the trunk of the car.

The meat was moved inside by loading into a big ice chest.  Tricia weighed the individual cuts to determine how much of each we got.

Then it was all loaded into the deep freeze.  We're still in hurricane season, so we always worry a little bit about losing power, but if the worst case scenario happens and we lost power, we'd figure out a way to save it.

In separating out the different cuts and weighing everything, we got 249 pounds total for $206.31.  That's about $0.83 per pound.

This will keep our family stocked with meat for the foreseeable future.  We do have two additional bulls growing out in the pasture as well once this is gone.  While we'd rather have heifers, bulls provide much needed meat.  We enjoy the tenderness and flavor of our grass-fed bulls that have never been off the property and are free of antibiotics and medicines.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To

This evening I went to retrieve the milk cows as they were eating grass way out in the pasture and ignored our calls to come to the barn to get milked.  Tricia was gathering together the bucket of fermented rice from the feed room in the barn to feed the chickens and they waited right outside the barn gate for supper.

That white behemoth by the barn door catches your eye, doesn't it?

That is our old deep freeze.  Although I shouldn't really use the word old.  The thing was only six years old when it bit the dust.  We were going to haul it off to the landfill, but I don't like hauling things to the dump.  Not when they have another use.

I remember when I was in junior high school, I showed sheep.  We had a red barn out behind the house and right outside the door, my dad had placed an old chest-type deep freezer that no longer worked and we used it to store sweet feed and Calf manna in.  The rats couldn't get to the feed in the deep freeze and it was sealed tightly and kept out moisture.  When you opened the door, the great smell of the sweet feed and calf manna hit your nostrils.  Sweet feed still brings back good memories of childhood.

So back to that white "eyesore" by the side of the barn.  I remarked to the salesperson at the store that we bought it from that it didn't last but six years. Surprisingly, I was told that is really all you can expect out of them these days. They aren't built to last. They also aren't built to be kept outdoors in the garage.  They don't have the insulation in them that they had back then.

My brother still has an old chest-type deep freeze that he inherited from my grandmother that we called Bumby.  It was and International Harvester brand and had a big 'hood ornament' right above the handle.  It kept the ice cream and other stuff frozen solid.  Well, forty-something years later and that thing is still running! Amazing.  Things used to be built to last - with pride.

I guess I have to look on the bright side.  It gave me six good years as a freezer and now it will give me many more good years as a storage receptacle for chicken feed.  

Taking Inventory

Taking inventory is one of those things that I do once a year.  It's not a glamorous task nor one I look forward to, but one that must be done.  Usually a night like last night is the perfect time for it.  We've gone almost a week without seeing the sun.  It has been overcast, muddy, chilly and gloomy.  Any outside activity should be avoided at all costs.

Last night I chopped some lighter pine and put it in the fireplace, added some oak firewood atop it, and crumpled some old sales circulars underneath the grate and lit it.  In no time the resin in the lighter pine erupted in flame along with black smoke. That lets you know that it won't be long until the oak will be crackling.  It also lets you know that it is important to call the chimney-sweep after 'fireplace season.' Although lighter pine assures a quick start to your firewood without natural gas, it also assures you that your chimney will have a thick black coating of pitch that will need to be cleaned out.

Once the fire was providing some heat, I went out into the garage and opened the freezer and removed insulated envelopes of seed that I store in the ice maker that no longer works.  There will be people that will tell you that a freezer is a horrible place to store seed due to the moisture content. They're probably right.  I've stored seed in the freezer in sealed envelopes for years now and haven't noticed problems with germination, though.  To combat the possibility of loss, I do diversify my seed storage and store any seed that I save from crops that I grow in a drawer in a cabinet in the house.  I place the seed in old vitamin containers that are moisture proof and don't allow light in.

Even though I like to keep good records, I like EVEN MORE the act of planting!  So, I am negligent in adjusting my seed inventory downward based on the seed that I plant each Spring and Fall.  Maybe I'll start this year...  (There's a saying about a road to somewhere that's paved with good intentions that comes to mind!)

Segregating the Seed by type and age

Back in high school accounting class, we learned the concept of FIFO.  FIFO stands for First In, First Out.  That is a good methodology to use in managing your seed inventory as it assures that you'll use your oldest seed first and will keep your seed inventory rotated and fresh.

I lay out all my seed by seed type: Melons, Beans, Peppers, Corn, Greens, Lettuce, etc. Then I carefully write down each variety I have in each category and the number of packages of seed.  Yes, this can be done using Excel or a computer program, and I've done that in the past.

Taking Stock

Now, I will inventory my saved seed that I store inside as well, but once I have the entire seed inventory written down, I'll compare that with my planting records from previous years to determine which additional seed I need to order to meet the needs of the upcoming planting season.  I'll make that list of needs and then I'll pull out the seed catalog and place my order.

2015 Seed Inventory as of January 14, 2015

Looking through seed catalogs is an enjoyable experience and I'll generally order some new items to try that I don't have in current inventory.  While not as fun as the act of sowing seed, taking inventory is a necessary task of a prudent grower that enables you to ensure that you are prepared.  Come to think of it, taking inventory is a critical part of the entire human experience that helps us determine whether we are prepared in any number of ways - physically, mentally, and (most important of all) spiritually.