An Easy Spring Dessert

We are right smack dab in the middle of the best strawberry harvest we've ever had.  Very early in the year I planted some bare root strawberries - a ten foot row of them in the very back of the garden by the sugar cane.  They have thrived!  In past years, we struggled because the slugs and snails would eat them before we could harvest them.  A nice lady from our church gave me a plastic shopping bag full of crushed up egg shells to sprinkle around the base of the plant (see below).  She told me that the sharp eggshells cut the slugs undersides when they slide to eat strawberries and die.  I did what she told me, and it appears to work!  

She then told me if the eggshells don't work, that there is another remedy for slugs.  Beer!  She told me to put plastic lids filled with beer around the strawberry plants.  The slimy critters are attracted to the scent, climb in and drown.  I have not tried this eradication option yet.  The last thing I need is a bunch of partying, drunken slugs and snails loitering in the garden.  That doesn't sound safe.

Each morning we can expect to get a handful like this.  I bring them in and Tricia makes us a nice strawberry breakfast smoothie with goat milk and our honey.

I'm going to share a new recipe we tried today that's a keeper: Honey-Lime Macerated Strawberries (a recipe from The School of Traditional Skills.)  Check 'em out!  

So macerated was a new vocabulary word for me.  It means softened while sitting in a liquid.  The acidity of the lime in this recipe pulls out the juice from the strawberries.  Here's what you need:

1 lb fresh strawberries

1 TBS Local Raw Honey

1 Lime zested and juiced

5-6 fresh mint leaves

Wash up the berries that just came out of the garden and pick the mint leaves and wash.

Cut up the strawberries in a glass bowl.  Drizzle the honey, lime juice and lime zest over the berries and stir to coat.

Here's where our new vocabulary word goes to work.  If you let the bowl of berries sit for 15-20 minutes at room temperature the berries soften and a bright red syrup will collect at the bottom of the bowl.  You might call it a maceration sensation.

When it's about time to serve, chiffonade your fresh mint leaves over the top and stir in.

After church we ate a nice meal and put coffee on.  We each fixed a little bowl with this easy spring dessert to go along with our coffee.

What a treat it was!  All the ingredients (except the limes, doggonit) were harvested right off of our land.  That makes it special - almost as special as the taste!  We'll keep this recipe and make more of this before the strawberry harvest ends.

Attempting to Make Splits

We've got big plans for our four honeybee hives.  Here it is April 16th and we're almost out of honey.  We pulled honey in July and again in the fall and our inventory is low.  I think we'll run out before we rob the hives.  So we got to thinking that we need a few more hives. If we had 6 hives instead of four, that would be perfect.

I do have swarm traps out to try to catch some wild swarms, but so far, no luck.  The other option is to make splits.  That's exactly what we did.  You'll notice the splits below.  Moving left to right, the third box and the last box are splits.  The splits come off of the existing four hives, and I'll try to explain what we did.

A quick description of making a split is as follows:  You get an empty box.  Then you open a healthy hive of bees with a strong population.  As you go through each frame in the brood chamber, you want to locate the queen.  On frames where the queen is NOT there, remove a frame of honey, a frame of pollen, a frame of eggs, a frame of uncapped and capped larva and put it in the empty box.  We attempted a split into a deep box and another split in the Nuc.

Within five hours, the nurse bees in the split hives realize that there is NO queen in the box by the lack of the scent of her pheromone.  That spells doom for a colony of bees, so they pick out a cell for the bee in which they'll make a queen.  To accomplish this, the nurse bees begin feeding it nothing but royal jelly that they produce from a gland in their heads.  I'll show a projected timeline below:

We made splits on April 6th, 

On April 9th the bees select the larvae that will become the queen cells
On April 11th, they cap the queen cells

On April 19th the queen hatches and leaves her cell
From April 22-April 26, the virgin queen takes orientation flights
From April 24-May 3 the queen takes her mating flight where she flies to meet a drone to get bred.
On April 26-May 3 you'll see your first eggs if mating was successful
By May 12, you'll want to investigate to ensure they've been successful in creating a new queen.

Here is the split hive that we put in a regular deep box:

And here's one that we put in a nuc.:

If the splits were successful, we should see a queen in the split hives as well as eggs by May 12.  We use bricks positioned on the top cover to tell the story about what's going on in the hive.  A brick laid longways tells us that we either saw the queen or we saw eggs.  A brick laid crossways, like the third and last hives tells you that no queen was located and no eggs were located.

If the splits were successful, we'll know about it and will be able to move the bricks on the 3rd and 6th hives longways.  We certainly hope we're successful in splitting and moving from four to six hives of honeybees.

Making Cajeta (Mexican Goat Milk Caramel)

We have well over a gallon of fresh goat milk in our ice box.  We've made pounds of cheese, made smoothies with it, use it instead of cow milk for everyday dairy needs and since we milk twice a day, it keeps piling up!  What to do with all this goat milk?  Well, we decided to make cajeta.  Cajeta is Mexican goat milk caramel, and it is delicious!

Recipe: (from Home Cheese Making by Ricki Carroll)

2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
3 quarts whole goat's milk
3 cups sugar

You dissolve the cornstarch and baking soda in 1 cup of the milk and stir to dissolve.  Then add the remaining milk and the sugar and stir... 

Bring it to a boil while continuing to stir...

And stir...  You can see the color starting to change.

And keep on stirring.  The consistency of the cajeta will start to thicken over time and the color will continue to darken.  You've gotta be patient.

You have to monitor the color and temperature closely.  When it hits 220 degrees, it is a thin, fluid sauce that you can use for drizzling over ice cream.  Getting it to 245 degrees results in a firm, chewy caramel.  By now the kitchen is filled with a rich aroma that beckons you to stand over the pot in gluttonous anticipation of the final product.

Pull the finished product off of the fire and pour or spoon into jars.  3 quarts of goat milk made 2 pints of caramel.

Unfortunately, I was at work when Tricia put this together and wasn't able to participate in my favorite activity - cleaning up the bowl and spoons!  You can't let any of that go to waste.  I think my wife handled that task in my absence after she took this photo:

Cajeta is great on ice cream or for any other way you'd eat caramel.  We are going to cut up pears and top with goat cheese, pecans, and cajeta on top.  Apples would be a fine substitute as well.  Or heck, you could just dip a spoon into that jar and get a big dollop of cajeta and eat it like candy.  This might just be my favorite way to eat it.

The jars will keep in the fridge, but we'll be making more and more cajeta.  I seriously doubt we have to worry about it going bad in the ice box.  Tricia was thinking about making millionaires with it by rolling pecans in it and dip into chocolate to make everyone's favorite candy.  YUM!

Pretty Things To Look At

I'll be the first to admit:  I'm not a flower guy.  We overwhelmingly plant things that we can eat.  I take that back - I primarily plant edible things.  Tricia plants flowering plants.  As I walk around in the yard on a nice spring day before it gets too hot, I begin to take in the pretty view.  First thing I notice is one of our many azalea bushes.  Most of the others' blooms have long since faded.  Azaleas are short lived.  They explode in awesome blooms and then just like that, they are gone.  There is one bush that has some nice azalea blooms on it:

I call this one our "watermelon" azalea.  The black anther of the flower and the reddish color of the bloom remind me of what it looks like to cut open a cold Charleston Gray on a hot summer's day.  I think of cutting pieces off of the wedge of watermelon with a butter knife, sprinkling salt on the melon with a salt shaker, and then popping the cold, sweet watermelon in my mouth.  

As i continue to walk, there is a blanket of white Dutch clover covering most of the backyard.  It's nearing the end now, as the days warm to the upper 80's already, but the honeybees are still doing their job on the clover as you can see by the busy bee in the direct center of the photo below.

Speaking of clover, I planted a couple of pounds of Crimson clover in the backyard for the bees.  It's starting to bloom all over.  I'll try to get some photos of all of the crimson blooms.  It's really a sight to see.  I certainly hope the crimson clover seeds and comes up again next year and the years following.

Finally, the first of the Louisiana iris bloomed this morning.  What a regal flower!  As with the crimson clover, I'll share more photos when all the Louisiana iris is in bloom.

Again, I'm not a flower guy, but those flowers I noticed inspired me to stop and take notice of the truly beautiful things around me that I might otherwise ignore.  I hope you have an enjoyable day, taking in and savoring the things of beauty that surround you in your life!

A Sign of the Times

Our little country church sits in the S curve on Highway 26 north of Jennings.  We have thirty something people attending on a typical Sunday morning.  Small in number, but big in love.  It is a loving family, not a perfect church, but a church that loves Jesus and one in which the people love each other.  God's Word is studied and believed that its truths are relevant as ever, and we still sing the old hymns.  It was founded in 1981.

In a recent business meeting, we decided that the age of our sign originally erected at the church's founding is in need of some work.  Rust had eaten away at the tubing that makes up the frame and lichen was growing on it.  This called for immediate attention.  On a recent Saturday morning, we arrived with ladders and a grinder and began grinding the entire sign, roughing up the surface for painting.

Then we primed the sign frame, having to climb way up there to get the top portion.  It was a beautiful day to get the work done.

Finally, we put a thick coat of oil based paint on the sign's frame.  The sign really shines now, but we're not done.

We're going to update the lettering on the sign, adding service times for Sunday School and Morning Worship as well as our church website address.  We're also looking at putting the same thing on the back side of the sign so that traffic southbound on Highway 26 will be able to see it.  We may look at a board beneath the sign that would allow us to put up lettering for Scripture verses and special announcements.  Finally, we'll plan on affixing some solar lighting to the sign so that it is lit up in the evening.

If you don't already have a church home, we'd love to have you come worship with us!  If you were looking for a sign, here it is.

Broody Hens in the Henhouse

Each afternoon around 5 pm, I grab the rustic wire egg basket that hangs from a rafter of our barn and I enter the henhouse.  The henhouse is where the birds roost for the night on roosting bars that line the eastern wall, but it is also where the hens lay their eggs.  We have nesting boxes that line the north and south walls of the henhouse - four boxes on the north wall and four on the south wall, along with a milk crate full of hay that they lay in.  It serves as an overflow nest when the other boxes are full.  Sometimes two hens crowd themselves in one box to lay farm fresh eggs for us.

The boxes on the south wall are closest to the woods and thus, attract rat snakes.  Big, long, scary, but harmless snakes that eat our eggs.  It is not uncommon to get ready to pick up eggs and find a six foot long snake coiled up in the box.  It is for that reason that I keep ceramic, wooden or chalk eggs in each box as a 'decoy' for the snakes to eat and get a fatal case of constipation.  I mark them with a black stripe written across them with a Sharpie so that we don't gather them up with the edible eggs.

I wanted to draw your attention to the black hen and the white hen.  They are all fluffed up as they make themselves look larger than they are.  They are quite aggressive and also make threatening noises when you try to move them to get the eggs out from underneath them.  They'll peck at your hands.  The thing is, the birds don't move - at all 24/7.  That's when you know they are broody.  

Broody hens have a strong, hormonal urge to set on their clutch of eggs and hatch out chicks.  She has nothing else on her mind except hatching out a clutch and mothering her young.  She lays no more eggs.  She stays on her nest.  She rarely even gets up to get food or water.  God put that instinct into our fine feathered friends.

In like manner, He also gives that to humankind.  It is the normal maternal instinct, biological clock, or whatever you wish to call it for us.  Tragically, we as a modern society have largely rejected this and walked away from this gift.  As a people, our birthrates have fallen dangerously close to not meeting replacement numbers.  Why?  Materialism.  Children are expensive.  Our time is more valuable.  If we don't have kids, we can afford the vacation or the camp on the lake or the $80,000 Suburban.  The real question is: if we don't have kids, what are we missing?  Can parenting break your heart?  Most certainly, but oh, the joy you can receive!  Can we learn something from the broody hen?  I think so.

"Leave me alone," says the black hen.

"Don't bother me.  I have a mission to fulfill," says the white hen.

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who have been sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, the way a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling. Behold, your house is being left to you desolate! For I say to you, from now on you will not see Me until you say, ‘Blessed is the One who comes in the name of the Lord!’”  Matthew 23:37-39

Jesus was speaking to Israel who had rejected her Messiah.  He likens His love to the deep, nurturing, compassionate care of a mother hen.  It's funny how you read verses like this and then walk into the henhouse and experience a teachable moment in looking at the broody hens that point you to our Savior and His great love.

 

Making Soft Goat Cheese

Last week we made a couple of batches of Chèvre.  We ate all of it and decided to try another soft goat cheese.  The recipe says it is a basic goat cheese for beginners.  That's what we are in this endeavor.  We purchased the book shown in the photo below that is very simple to understand.

We followed the recipe below with the only change is that our goat milk is not pasteurized.

 We followed the directions and after a day the curds had formed in the pot.

Tricia scooped out the curds and set them in a strainer to allow the excess whey to drain out below.

We set it aside to allow the cheese to drain for 2 days.

After the cheese has drained for a while, it shrinks down a bit.

We picked some fresh dill we have growing on the back patio and cut it up.

The dill is folded into the fresh cheese along with coarse salt.

We put it into a strainer to allow for additional drainage.

The one pound round of soft goat cheese is done!  We ate it on matzos and toast.  It was delicious and we quickly ate the whole thing followed by another after that.

We like this even better than the Chèvre.  We currently have a gallon and a half of goat milk in the fridge.  We'll be making more and more of this.  Like I mentioned, we'll also make some cajeta (goat milk caramel) soon.  I can't wait for that.