Random Things You Pick Up

This past October Tricia and I were in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana to celebrate our 35th anniversary at a little restaurant that we enjoy called Cafe' Sydnie Mae.  Prior to eating we walked down to the bridge and overlooked Bayou Teche from a deck.  The chocolate milk-colored water slowly drifted amongst the lily pads.

After a wonderful meal we walked down the main street and settled into a cafe on the corner and listened to musicians playing cajun french music.  It's just an impromptu thing the townsfolk do on Saturday morning.  There are all sorts of little shops up and down the street with crafts and antiques and whatnot.

I'm not a shopping type of guy.  I don't like to "just look."  I know what I want and I go in and get it and get out - quickly.  But it's our anniversary and I'm minding my p's and q's.  I follow Tricia in a little store to browse, but before we go in, something catches my eye on the porch.  It's old pieces of cypress sinkers for sale.  I just had to have it.  The one I picked out was $35 and it was our 35th wedding anniversary, so I guess it was meant to be.

I asked the lady in the little shop where the cypress came from and she said, "Right here in the Atchafalaya Swamp."  The Atchafalaya had tons of old growth cypress that was logged in the 1800's. As you drive over the Atchafalaya Freeway and look out, you can see a multitude of stumps that testify to the time when cypress trees covered the landscape.  Cypress is a quality wood that contains oils that make it resistant to rot, insects and decay.  We made our purchase and headed home with it.  Didn't you know that a piece of cypress wood is an ideal anniversary gift?

What in the world are we going to do with that?  Well, we're gonna hang it on our wall over my office.  And after sitting in the corner of my office for a little over 3 months, we hung it up.  I like to think it adds character to the room.

Speaking of character, if you want to see a character talking about cypress sinker logs and actually pulling one up that's been underwater for a century and then cut it up into lumber, click below.  Pretty interesting!

Our Daily Bread(s)

Can't remember the last time we purchased a loaf of bread at the grocery store.  When Tricia started making sourdough bread, we both decided that it would be homemade sourdough from then on.  It's just so good.  Generally, we go through two loaves a week.  We can eat through half a loaf when the two loaves come out of the oven, hot and steamy, slathered with copious amounts of butter.

But there's more than just regular loaves of sourdough bread.  The sourdough starter can be used in many different types of recipes.  In addition to the regular loaves, we make bagels and keep some always frozen.  They're easy to pop out, thaw and make a bagel sandwich for lunch, or spread cream cheese on for a snack, or to eat with breakfast.

Last week Tricia made focaccia with kalamata olives and fresh rosemary and olive oil drizzled on top.  Here it is about to go into the oven:

Here it is shortly thereafter, with only about a quarter of it remaining... Oops!  

Of course there's the sourdough cinnamon rolls with cream cheese icing.  These are top notch, I tell ya.

I remember in both elementary and high school, the lunchroom ladies were famous for their hot yeast rolls.  They were so buttery and delicious!  They weren't sourdough, but Tricia wanted to attempt to recreate the same roll, albeit with sourdough.  So a trial batch went in the oven.

We had to put a pat of butter on top and try it out.

So good, I tell ya.  For lunch we split a roll in half and picked some fresh lettuce that we laid inside the roll and topped with some egg salad.  As the days are getting longer now, we have more than enough eggs.  It made for a nice little lunch!  Sourdough is fantastic.  We were trying to figure out when we first started it.  We can't remember.  You have to feed the starter and keep it going.  Tricia doesn't think it's been 10 years, but 7 to 8 years for sure.  I hope we can keep it living for years and years to come.

Scare Guns - It's For the Birds (Literally)

It's rice planting time in the area.  Like clockwork, gigantic, monstrous, humongous flocks of blackbirds show up.  The sheer multitude of these birds make it hard to farm.  If you don't do something about it, they will fly in in large waves and eat up every last grain of rice.  As soon as you plant it, they gobble it up.  Here is a very small representation of what I'm talking about in my neighbor's pasture that borders a rice field.

When I was farming, we would ride around in pickup trucks with a 12 gauge shotgun and pepper them to kill them or at least keep them moving.  To give you an idea of the size and scope of the problem, a good friend of mine once headed up a taskforce at a local USDA office that dealt with problem wildlife like birds around airports and, yes, birds eating farmers' rice.  This time of year was very busy, hiring people to try to eradicate or at least scare the birds away.  The blackbirds roost in cane and nearby trees.  They make a lot of racket and when the fly over you, it is amazing how many of them there are.

One of the things that we would also do when farming was the use of scare guns.  A scare gun is a mechanical device on a timer that is powered by a propane bottle.  You set it on the edge of your rice field in areas with heavy black bird pressure.  The gun fires off every so often to hopefully keep them moving and stop their all you can eat buffet in your rice field.  It is a successful strategy at least early on, until the birds get immune to the noise.  It's better to have a gun that knocks some down instead of merely making a loud noise.  I think they need to see some of their dead brethren on the ground for it to be some sort of a deterrent.

What's going on increasingly is a migration.  Not only the migration of blackbirds, but the migration of people moving out of the city to enjoy country life.  The sunrises and sunsets.  The serenity of the great outdoors.  The slower pace of living and wide open spaces.  But when they move, I don't think they completely understand that they are moving out of neatly manicured neighborhoods and in the midst of working farms where crop dusters fly overhead early in the morning, where dust from tractors blows when plowing, where cows moo, roosters crow, and the smell may not always be appealing.  There is also the noise from irrigation wells running 24/7, from dryer motors running all day and night for weeks on end during harvest times, and yes, from scare guns during planting time.

Tensions came to a head at a recent Jefferson Davis Policy Jury meeting in which upset residents expressed displeasure with the noise of scare guns.  The Police Jury listened to both sides of the argument.  Fortunately for the farmers (and unfortunately for the people who recently built homes in the middle of a rice field), there are existing "Right to Farm" statutes sitting on the books that protecting the farmers' right to farm.  In other words, they can continue to use the scare guns to prevent their crops from being eaten by the birds.

While I enjoy a peaceful night's sleep as much as the next guy, I also like to eat rice!  Moving to the country has it's positives for sure.  That's why I'm here, but before one moves, he or she should consider all the pros and cons.  I remember a couple that moved out to Hooterville from Manhattan.  Things were sure different for them, weren't they?

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Green Acres is the place for me
Farm Livin' is the life for me
Land stretchin' out from far and wide
Keep Manhattan, just gimme that countryside...

I'm Popeye The Sailor Man

I would say there is an awful lot of propaganda today, but there was some of that when I was younger, too.  Take for instance, Popeye the Sailor Man.  We'd watch cartoons and it blew my mind how Popeye's success was tied to... spinach!  When he needed strength or to help Olive Oil, he'd pull out a can of spinach, squeeze it, and the spinach would go into his pipe.  Soon, with bulging forearms, he was able to handle anything.  Spinach gave him strength and who wouldn't want to be like Popeye?  He didn't have to work out or be particularly healthy.  He just had to eat spinach at critical times to get the results he needed.

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As a child I remember this can in our pantry...

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Also Del Monte had cans of spinach.  Mom had some of this in the pantry.  Of course spinach is healthy, but canned spinach is not the way you want to eat it.  You want to eat it fresh out of the garden. We grow an heirloom French variety, Monstrueux de Viroflay.  The leaves are big and bright green.  You just know its healthy for you.

For supper the other night, Tricia asked me to pick a pound of spinach.  The spinach leaves were big and thick with almost a leather-like feel to them.  The wife was going to make Cream of Spinach soup.  It's a simple dish, with fresh ingredients: Spinach, onion, garlic, broth, and cream.  You can see old Rosie in the background.  I fed her some spinach so she wouldn't feel left out.

The spinach wasn't picked for 10 minutes before it was processed and cooking in a dutch oven on the stovetop.  What a brilliant green color it is!

We've go lots more spinach to harvest.  Tricia pulled out a recipe for Creamed Spinach.  Perhaps we'll have this soon!  Ruth's Chris Steakhouse has this as a side dish.  It is rich, cheesy, and delicious.  I also found a recipe for spinach and cream cheese crepes.  We've never cooked that and the recipe looks really good.  If spinach does make you stronger, we'll be beneficiaries of that strength because we have lots of spinach to eat.  None of it will be coming from a can!

Running Out of Room

Right inside our back door, first room on the left, is our utility room.  That room was the washroom. It is where the washer and dryer resides along with a big sink for mopping.  The room has cabinets to store household cleaning products.  At least that's how the room was designed.  That was before we got cows.  And goats.  And chickens.  And honeybees.  And everything else that goes along with having a little homestead farm.  

Now, that little room is bursting at the seams.  We've tried to start living with a new rule that states that if we purchase something new, then something old has to go - a policy for managing space.  For example, if I buy a new shirt, then an old shirt gets donated to the thrift store or gets converted to the rag bin.  That policy doesn't always work though with items other than clothes.

Had we known that we'd be getting into the homesteading life, our house would have been designed differently with a much larger pantry, room for additional freezers and definitely more storage space.  Let me show you the utility room to give you an idea.  The struggle is real!  Here's the counter when you walk in.  The incubator does hatch eggs, but it is currently being used to liquify jars of honey that has crystallized over the winter.  The washer and dryer is on the left.  Countertop is full of anti-parasite meds for the animals.

To the left when you walk in stands an organizer shelf with tools, battery chargers, and veterinary supplies.  We ran out of space and a bin of beekeeping supplies sits on the floor with frames of drawn comb wrapped in bags and some rendered beeswax sitting on top.  There's also soapmaking supplies and candle-making supplies.  It makes it next to impossible to open the door and move around the room.

Here's the sink on the right when you walk in.  When we're milking cows, this space gets busy as it's where we bring the stainless steel pails in and pour milk into gallon jars and then wash the buckets.  Our unopened seed packets and gardening supplies clutter the countertop.

The cabinets over the washer and dryer are full.  Empty jars for honey production line the windowsill and dirty clothes hampers sit on top of the dryer, along with other items.  Oil lamps for hurricane season are stored above the cabinets, along with kerosene.

Above the sink, we have a shelf for picnic baskets, garden harvest baskets, pressure canner, and ice chests we use for carrying milk when we're milking.  That got some stuff off of the floor.

Just last week I got a 1x12 pine board and some brackets and stained the shelving and put up yet another row of shelving above the entrance door for additional storage capacity for this little room.

To be sure, we are full.  We're planning on making splits and catching swarms to expand the beekeeping operation a little bit, but of course, that means we'll need additional room for storage.  Storage units.  We've never rented storage units.  In fact, that wouldn't work for us since it's off-site and we need access here when we need supplies.  I read that the storage units are a relatively new invention.  The first one was built in the 1960's in Texas.

We've become a people that have a lot of stuff.  I heard a podcast the other day that discussed this, saying that nomadic people don't value material things.  Because they are always on the move, they value items that are portable and quickly discard things that tie them down.  It was the agrarian mindset that changed this.  People became anchored to the land.  As they traveled and saw things, they'd say, "Hmm...  I think I'll take that home.  I can use it."  This mindset became prevalent as people not even in agrarian settings began to accumulate stuff.  Personally, I think it's okay if it is stuff you use.  If not, it's best to get rid of it or give it away.

So that leads us to think about storage, and at some point we'll look at buying some sort of an outdoor shed that we can use as a Honey House for all the beekeeping supplies.  We'd like to find one that is a "repo" building that perhaps we could get for a good deal.  Finding one is on our radar, and we are looking to purchase one - perhaps sometime this spring or summer.  We don't want our utility room to look like we are hoarders!

Trying Out the New Garden Sink

We have two rows of carrots in the back of the garden.  It's past time to pull them.  I pulled one of the rows yesterday.  You can kind of see where that row was in the lower part of the photo below.  I planted seven hills of zucchini and seven hills of crookneck squash between the carrot rows.  I hope I didn't jump the gun as I saw that after a week of temps in the upper 70's this week, early next week we'll see low temps at 33!

I had quite a pile of big fat carrots on the ground in front of the garden sink.  I couldn't actually put them in the sink as I have it against the garden fence and the cows were craning their necks over to try to eat the carrot greens.  Patience, cows!  I'm gonna feed them to you, but I have to cut the greens off the carrots first!

In the last week of January we had hard freezes for several nights with lows in the low 20's so I had turned the water valve off that controls water flow to the rear of the garden.  To wash up the carrots, I turned the valve back on.  Oh boy!  When I did that, water sprayed everywhere!  The sprayer portion is made of plastic, of course, and split right down the middle in the hard freeze.  I was sure that I had drained all the water out of it, but apparently not.  I'll have to replace the sprayer as it is beyond repair.  I was still able to wash all the carrots, in workaround fashion as I just held the carrots up to the busted sprayer handle.  Not exactly what I hoped for, but I was able to complete the job.

These are Danvers carrots and I waited too long to harvest them.  They'll still be good to eat, they're just fat and some are misshapen.  This happens when they are overcrowded and compete for nutrients.  I need to do a better job of thinning them out.  It's all good though.  We'll eat every last one of them.  I need to harvest that last row next week.

After washing them all up, I brought a big basket of carrots inside.  The basket must have weighed 15 pounds.

We'll roast most of these in the oven, but will also make Cream of Carrot soup, eat some of them raw on a vegetable platter with dip, shred some of them for use in cole slaw and sauerkraut, make fermented ginger carrots and finally make a big carrot cake!

I have to put another item on my to do list:  Fix the sprayer on the new garden sink before I harvest the other row of carrots.

What To Do With Too Much Cilantro

We let cilantro go to seed in our garden each year, so it comes up on its own year after year.  Which is a good thing for tacos or pico de gallo.  But when the cilantro becomes a jungle of cilantro, what do you do?

It's good!  The flavor is so powerful; the fragrance so pungent.  Some people don't like it and say it tastes like soap, but we like it!

I decided we'd try to find something else to do with cilantro besides the same old same olds.  We love basil pesto.  I wonder if you could make cilantro pesto?  Why, yes you can!  You'll need:

1/2 cup pecans,
2 cups cilantro
2 garlic cloves
1/2 cup olive oil
1 1/2 TBS lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cayenne pepper

This takes all of about five minutes to pull together.  Mix it up for a bit in the food processor.  It has a nice bright green color to it and is very fragrant!

The wife got some angel hair pasta going and added the cilantro pesto to it.  Delicious!

She also cut some baguettes up into little slices and toasted them to make crostini.  We spooned some cilantro pesto on the warm crostini.  That's a nice little appetizer, I tell ya!

Although the official recipe didn't call for it, I think if you'd grate up some Parmesan cheese into the pesto, it would kick the cilantro pesto into overdrive.  We're going to try that next time.  I don't think it is possible to eat all the cilantro that is out there in the garden, but this recipe gives us another option.  Warm weather will cause the cilantro to bolt to seed.  That means more cilantro for next year!