Bottling the Homemade Tabasco Sauce

Back in August, we posted THIS POST EXPLAINING HOW WE MAKE HOMEMADE TABASCO SAUCE.  We allowed the tabasco sauce to age in the refrigerator for about three months. In past years I saved a few hot sauce bottles and I'm glad I did.  I wish I had more now.  So I gave the tabasco sauce in the big bottle a good shake, retrieved a sieve and a funnel and began the process of bottling the hot sauce.

To do this I poured the hot sauce through the seive and used a spoon to push the sauce on through. The more liquid portion of the sauce flowed through the funnel and into the two bottles that I had on hand. The mash was left in the sieve.  Now there is at all nothing wrong with leaving the mash in the sauce.  The only problem with that is that it doesn't flow well with the skins and seeds still part of the sauce.

When I had run out of bottles, I had some 'mash' left in the sieve.  Should I throw it away?  Put it in the compost pile?  Both of those are decent options, but we're going to do something different with the tabasco sauce mash.

The Monster Mash

Tricia had made some Carne Guisada and some homemade corn tortillas.  A lightbulb went off in my head and both Russ and I were thinking the same thing. We took a warm corn tortilla and using the back of a spoon, we slathered the tabasco sauce mash evenly on the corn tortilla.  Then we filled the tabasco mash smeared corn tortilla with carne guisada.  The tabasco mash gave the dish a real 'bang!'

We have many more tabasco peppers ripening on the plant right now.  I'll likely pick some more and get another batch brewing.  No dull, flavorless meals at our supper table!!  Our Tabasco Sauce takes care of that.

Election Day 2016

Today was Election Day.  We set the alarm back 30 minutes earlier than usual so that we could go out and milk the cows and I could shower, shave, get dressed and go to the polls and do my civic duty in time to make it to work in Lafayette on time. I drove up in the dark to the volunteer fire station that is my polling place and even at 6:15 there were many people already voting.  Looking at the book where I signed my name, I could see that many people had already taken advantage of early voting.

After I voted I pulled the curtains back and one of the friendly precinct workers asked if I wanted an "I voted" sticker to wear on my shirt.  Of course I said yes. When I got to work I pulled it off my shirt and stuck it on my Day Planner.  I really liked the sticker!  Take a look.

For those that aren't familiar, that is the famous "Blue Dog" painted by George Rodrigue, Mr. Rodrigue was a painter who was originally from New Iberia, Louisiana.  He went to USL and spent lots of time near Bayou Teche and began painting many scenes of Louisiana landscapes - big live oak trees draped with Spanish Moss and other Cajun themes.

The paintings that really catapulted him to fame were the 'Blue Dog' paintings, featuring a blue dog with searching yellow eyes.  The blue dog was inspired by Mr. Rodrique's deceased dog, Tiffany. Here is what George Rodrique said about the blue dog courtesy of Wikipedia:

"The yellow eyes are really the soul of the dog. He has this piercing stare. People say the dog keeps talking to them with the eyes, always saying something different. People who have seen a Blue Dog painting always remember it. They are really about life, about mankind searching for answers. The dog never changes position. He just stares at you. And you’re looking at him, looking for some answers, ‘Why are we here?,’ and he’s just looking back at you, wondering the same. The dog doesn’t know. You can see this longing in his eyes, this longing for love, answers."

— Rodrigue on the Blue Dog

The Louisiana Secretary of State authorized the blue dog "I Voted" stickers to entice people to come out and vote.  I read that people really like the stickers.  In fact some Louisiana residents are selling their blue dog stickers on eBay for $18 each!  Wow! I shouldn't have stuck mine on my calendar!

Like Rodrigue's quote above about the blue dog on my election sticker, I think the election is truly about mankind looking for some answers.  Like the blue dog, we're all longing for love and answers. The trouble is, no political candidate has the answers.  Regardless of the outcome of this thing, we shouldn't look to man or woman for answers.

Fortunately for us, the Bible has the answers and speaks about elections - although not the type of election we're watching now - a much more important one!:

Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall: For so an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.  2 Peter 1:10-11

Keep the faith!

Buying a Soap-Making Kit

We have lye and have rendered our own tallow and have our own goat milk and dried herbs and everything else we need to make homemade soap, but sometimes when we start something new, I need to get kick-started with something easy to give me the confidence.  I saw that they had a soap making bundle at Cultures For Health.  I purchased the bundle that makes Rosemary-Peppermint soap.  That seemed like an interesting combination.

The bundle, pictured below, contained instructions, a soap mold, glycerine soap base, rosemary essential oil, and organic dried peppermint.  No, the box of Popeye's chicken was not an ingredient in the soap.  So let's make some soap.  I'll give a short review at the bottom.

Cultures for Health Soap Making Bundle

The first thing you do is cut up the glycerine soap base into one-inch squares.  This helps the soap base to melt quickly.  The glycerine is soft and cuts easily.  Benjamin helped to cut up the glycerine.

Cutting up soap

In a double boiler (two pots nested together with water in the bottom one), we melted the glycerine soap base.  In no time at all it melted into a smooth consistency.

We dropped 40 drops of Rosemary essential oil into the melted glycerine soap base and stirred.

Then we added two tablespoons of dried peppermint and stirred.

Once it was all mixed up, it was pretty much done.  This almost looks like an alfredo sauce  or something that you would pour over some linguine or bowtie pasta. but trust me, you wouldn't want to do that!

Tricia carefully poured the soap into the soap molds and was able to do so without spilling it.

The recipe actually made a little bit more that the four molds contained in the kit. Fortunately we had some extras that I had purchased at Hobby Lobby and so we poured the excess into that mold, yielding 5 bars of homemade Rosemary-Peppermint Soap.

The soap dried quickly (~2 hours) and it didn't take much effort to pop the soap out of the mold.  The soap smelled great!  It looked great, too.

In summary, the soap making bundle was EASY.  I mean it was so very easy a child could do this. This would be a good project for a family with young children to do or perhaps a grandma & grandpa with the grandkids.  It would be a good craft project for a Mother's Day gift.  If someone said a dirty word and required "getting their mouth washed out with soap," I figure that Rosemary-Peppermint soap would be better tasting than Ivory!

We like doing business with Cultures for Health, but I found that from an economical standpoint, the soap-making bundle was a little pricey.  The total cost before shipping was $30.99 or $6.20 per bar. That is just a little too much for my liking.  To be fair, however, we still have most of the bottle of Rosemary Essential Oil and most of the bag of dried organic peppermint.  The peppermint will come in handy for making tea this winter.  Not to mention the fact that the soap molds are re-usable. Considering that, you could probably knock a buck or a buck fifty maybe off the unit cost.

We had a good time making the soap.  It smells great and we can't wait to use it. Probably the best part about it is that we now have the confidence and are now motivated to make our own soap. Standby - hopefully in the next few weeks we'll embark upon mixing lye and tallow to make some old-fashioned lye soap.

A Living Souvenir

When my Dad got his undergraduate degree from USL (University of Southwestern Louisiana) in Lafayette, Louisiana, if I'm remembering the story correctly, USL gave the graduates an acorn from one of the live oak trees on campus.  My dad gave it to his grandmother and she put it in a coffee can and later planted it in her yard right smack dab in the middle of Kinder, Louisiana.  There it grew and grew and grew and now is a big live oak.

I like things like that - growing things that have some significance and have sentimental value.  I've posted in the past about doing the same thing by planting an acorn from an Alamo Oak when Tricia and I were engaged in San Antonio, Texas.  I also have an 8 foot tall oak tree that I grew from an acorn I picked up in Tallahassee, Florida during a difficult time in our lives.  In a time where many things are disposable and are here today - gone tomorrow, I like the idea of being able to look at a tree and tell kids and/or grandkids stories about memories surrounding the planting of that tree.  It gives some semblance of permanence or a living legacy or heritage.

Since LSU's alma mater begins with the words: "Where stately oaks and broad magnolias shade inspiring halls," I thought it would be a good idea to replicate USL's oak tree tradition and give my daughter a live oak tree grown from an acorn picked up from campus to commemorate her graduation from LSU in the spring of 2016.  The only problem was that I couldn't find any acorns in May.  I remedied that on a recent trip to LSU for a football game.  As we walked around campus, I picked up acorns from several oak trees around campus and put them in my pocket.

Future "Stately" Oaks

Last weekend I planted the eight live oak acorns in a terra cotta pot on the back patio and I keep the soil moist by watering them every other day.

Two acorns about to be covered with soil and watered

I'll keep checking on them and hopefully will soon see sprouts emerging from the soil.  In a post from earlier this year that you can read by clicking HERE I told the story about a book called The Man Who Planted Trees.  That book was inspiring to me and reinforced the idea that you can make a difference by planting trees.  That's one of the reasons I came home with a pocket full of live oak acorns from a football game.  We'll see in a little while if any of the 8 acorns germinates.  If not, I'll fill my pockets on my next visit and we'll try this out again. 

A Quick Look at the Fall Garden

The other day my new job in Lafayette took me a little south and west from the office and I found myself driving down roads that I haven't driven down in years and years.  On an old country road between Loreauville and New Iberia, Farmers were in the middle of sugar cane harvest and as I looked at the cane, it dwarfed the tractors and 18 wheeler tractor trailers loaded with the chopped sugar cane.  I had never seen sugar cane that tall before.  While sugar cane is grown right down the road from where we live, it is not nearly this tall.  My first thought was that perhaps this was a different variety of sugar cane.

But then I looked at the soil.  It was rich and black as onyx.  There's the answer.  It is the rich soil that makes the cane grow like Jack's beanstalk.  The soil is everything.  Unfortunately, the soil 50-something miles west where I live isn't near that good.  Not even close.  We work every year, though, to amend our soil with manure, compost, organic matter, lime and other amendments to improve it, but this takes work, time, and great patience.  Truth be told, I'd like to import some of that black soil to Jeff Davis Parish.

But despite the soil deficiencies and the weather struggles we've had this year, we're still growing fresh vegetables.  Let's take a look.  Here is some healthy looking (and healthy for you to eat) Russian Red Kale.

I love to see the dew-kissed leaves.  While the leaves are still small - about five inches long and four inches wide, it won't be too much longer before it's time to pinch a nice little bunch of these to cook down for supper.

Here is a 24 foot row of Bok Choy or Chinese Cabbage planted from seed I saved from four years ago.  The germination of this saved seed was off the charts.  They are planted really thick as insurance against poor germination, but now I know I didn't need to do this.

I'll thin them out by plucking out a 'mess' of the baby bok choy to braise as a healthy, tasty side dish for supper.  The young, tender leaves are tasty.    

If there is such thing as growing candy in the garden, this is as close as it gets. Here is a portion of a 24 foot row of Sugar Snap Peas.  The young peas are reaching skyward with their tendrils about to grab hold of the trellis.

When these sugar snap peas bloom and put on pods, many of them never make it in to the kitchen to be stir fried - they get eaten right out here in the garden.

These are late this year due to the unusually wet August that delayed planting, but our carrots are just popping up.

And here is some baby spinach.  I planted more spinach a couple weeks later than these were planted to have a staggered harvest.  Raw spinach is good.  So is creamed spinach.  That might be good on the Thanksgiving menu.

One row over is the cabbage, then cauliflower, and then broccoli.

There's other items coming and I've yet to plant my mustard and turnips, but it is a good start considering the delay.  I'll show the fall tomatoes a little later.  It is really going to to be a race to see if we get any tomatoes before the first frost.  They have their first blooms now.  Who knows?  It is November and in the 80's still.  It is an abnormal year for sure.  That's what makes gardening the adventure that it is!

A Treat for Your Feet

There is an old saying that "You can tell a man by his shoes."  If that is indeed true, then I'm in trouble.  Often at home when it is dry out in the pasture I break all fashion trends by wearing Crocs with socks.  I know - it is a horrible, unforgivable fashion crime, but they are comfortable.  When it is wet and muddy I wear some old Lacrosse rubber boots that have several years's worth of encrusted milk petrified to the sides of them.

For church and work, however, I do try to keep my shoes looking nice.  I read an article the other day that stated that "you should polish your shoes more often than you think you need to because people really do judge you by the condition of your shoes."  Although the shoes below were purchased at Jos. A Banks a number of years ago and aren't Johnston & Murphy's or Allen Edmonds, they are comfortable and can be worn with khakis or jeans.

It was embarrassing to look down the other day and see both of them looking like the one on the right.  It actually looked like I had been gardening in them.  Although I wasn't gardening in them, at work today, I did climb a roof with a 10/12 pitch with them on.  I don't think they were designed fo that!  Time to do something about them!

A couple of years ago I wrote a post called 24 of My Favorite Smells and looking back I should have put 25 and added Shoe Polish.  I like the way that shoe polish smells.  There are many ways to give your shoes a shine and my way is not the best way, but it works for me.  I use an old cut up t-shirt to liberally run some shoe polish all over the shoes, rubbing it in in a circular motion.

Then I use a stiff-bristled brush to brush the polish into all the little nooks and crannies that naturally occur in leather shoes.

Then I use an old cotton sock turned inside out to buff all the polish off.  Then I repeat the process of polishing the shoes with another layer of shoe polish and then buff that second layer off to achieve a nice shine.  It makes the shoes look semi-new again versus the embarrassing dirty shoe you see in the picture at the top of this post.

Finally, since these shoes are casual and will be worn some in the rain, I spray some Protect-All on them to repel rain & stain.

It darkens them up a bit and removes a bit of the shine, but it will protect the shoes and enable me to get more mileage out of them.  If you are a man (or woman) that appreciates instant gratification, shining your shoes provides just that.  You can see the fruit of your labors almost immediately.

And Now For The Good News

Yesterday we recounted a sad story about the death of two of our hens by a bloodthirsty trespasser. That was really bad news for our flock.  Something had to be done.  I didn't want to lose another bird to whatever predator that took the lives of the two Aracauna sisters.  My initial guess was that this was either a raccoon or a possum. The fugitive must be brought to justice!

It is a joy for the just to do justice, But destruction will come to the workers of iniquity. Proverbs 21:15

I had a couple of cage traps stored in the rafters of the barn.  Benjamin and I pulled them down and tested them to ensure that they were in working condition.  Tricia had a tupperware container of canned salmon in the fridge that I conscripted for use as bait in our trap.  The salmon would stink and attract our predator.  If you look in the picture below, right outside the perimeter fence is a patch of woods that grows right next to the hen house.

I located a trail of sorts that ran parallel to the perimeter fence on the woods side of the fence and figured that this might be evidence of our predator.  I put the traps directly in the path and placed a paper bowl with a dollop of smelly salmon in it to attract the predator.  I hoped that Saturday night after we set the trap, the killer would go on his nocturnal hunt and would meet his end.

Sunday morning after the sun rose and we made our way to the barn, I looked around the hen house and saw no new feathers and saw no new chicken carcasses. Good.  I walked to the south side of the hen house and immediately saw that we had caught the murderer!  A big, fat, male possum.

You know I like my chicken fried...

This bad boy was fat!  He was unhappy with his confinement and hissed at me.  I hissed back.  No doubt that he was on his way to eat chicken on Saturday night, but those plans changed when he came across the smelly salmon.

After church services, Benjamin, Russ, and I walked back out to the trapped possum where a brief trial was held, the guilty perpetrator sentenced and then was summarily executed by Benjamin and his .22 rifle.  With two properly placed shots, the possum's days of killing chickens were brought to an end.

But that was not the end to the possum.  We don't waste a thing around here. Where one man might see a nasty dead possum, I see fertilizer.  We carried the old possum to the garden, dug a hole and trench composted him between the Sugar Snap Peas and the Russian Red Kale and right next to the carcasses of the two hens he killed the night before.

So that's the good news.  The killer was brought to justice and in so doing, brought fertility to our garden.