Please Make the Fleas Flee

Poor Belle has been scratching.  The hot, dry days of summer has been almost unbearable, but an infestation of fleas that has been worse than we've ever seen, has made Belle's summer miserable.  Time to do something about it.  Step 1 was giving her a bath to get them off.  Tricia did some research and mixed up a solution of vinegar and Dawn dishwashing liquid.

This was only the second bath that Belle has had.  We didn't know exactly how she was going to deal with it.  We wet her down and then slowly poured the solution on her.  She didn't object too badly.

We scrubbed and scrubbed.  The sudsy action cleaned her up, but we noticed the fleas fleeing.  Soon, they were dying.  Then, they were dead.  

The dawn and vinegar supposedly kills and/or repels fleas.  We saw quite a few fleas in Belle's long hair, but they were no longer moving after the bath.  We used a brush to brush them all out.

We also got some flea treatment that we put on her back in four spots - from her shoulder to the head of her tail.  We blew out the garage with the leaf blower and then I sprayed a flea killing pesticide around the garage.  We do NOT want them coming in the house.  After watching Belle for a while, she's no longer scratching near as much as she was doing before.

How Do You Like Your Eggs?

This is almost a sacrilege, I know, but I don't like my eggs "sunny side up."  I don't like my eggs "over easy."  I don't like a runny yolk.  Tricia describes the way I like my eggs is "toasted."  In other words, cooked through.  I like them with peppers and onions in them, spiced up, with cilantro and green onions on top.  I have a good wife that goes through the extra time and steps to prepare for me eggs to my liking.

We eat a LOT of eggs.  Scrambled, Fried, Boiled, and Pickled.  We have lots of hens and pick up multitudes of eggs each day.  We've experimented with several methods of preserving eggs.  One of the ones we showed you was Waterglassing eggs.  We were looking for another method and that's what we'll talk about tonight.

We have been really using the food dehydrator that a friend gave us many years ago.  We have dehydrated more things this year than you could shake a stick at.  So we got to thinking.  Why not eggs?  I've got to admit, powdered eggs do not seem appetizing to me.  I think of school cafeterias.  But with the girls laying "to beat the band," we have to think of new and different methods (to us) of food preservation.  Let's give it a whirl.

To dry eggs in our dehydrator, we'll use our new silicone trays.  We cracked a number of eggs and scrambled with a whisk and then poured on the trays in the dehydrator.  We put the setting on 135 degrees for 6-8 hours.  In just a little bit, they looked like this!:  (Note the dark yellow color of the pastured hens' yolks.)

At the eight hour mark, they looked like this:

We turned off the dehydrator, crumbled the eggs up and poured into an air tight jar.

We will eventually blend into a powder.  Basically, to re-hydrate them, you add one tablespoon dried egg powder to 1 tablespoon hot water and that equals 1 egg.  Simply scramble them to the consistency you like your eggs.  Disclaimer:  We just did this, and have plenty of fresh eggs, so I haven't tasted them yet.  I'm anxious to do so and give a taste test review of powdered eggs.  We'll keep ya posted.

Independence Day

Happy Independence Day, Fellow Americans.  May God Bless America!

The boys came over and Tricia and I barbecued chicken, sausage, hamburgers, and grilled vegetables from the garden.  We had homemade vanilla ice cream served over warm blueberry cobbler.  It was delicious.  We hope you enjoyed your time with family as well.

I have been on a Paul Harvey kick lately, going back and listening to him speak.  He was a real treasure.  On Independence Day, I wanted to attach a video for you to watch about the signers of the Declaration of Independence.  I learned something about them and it made me respect them even more than I already did.

What GREAT men!  Not perfect men, but great men nonetheless.  There has only been one perfect man that walked this earth.  I strongly feel it is unfair to judge people in the past by standards of the present.  We have evolved in our thinking.  We have corrected past wrongs.  There is such a thing as learning from past mistakes and, yes, redemption.

Our founders were great men.  Men who risked it all.  I think you'll find this 9 minute video from Paul Harvey worth the time:

They mutually pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.  Because of that, we enjoy freedom.  May God Bless America and may freedom continue to ring!

My Favorite Peas in the Garden

If you want to "grow protein" in the garden, you cannot overlook the cowpea.  We grow them every single year.  Mostly, we grow three varieties: Black-eyed peas, Purple Hull peas, and Ozark Razorback peas.  The lowly cowpea has nodules that set nitrogen in the soil.  They effectively produce their own fertilizer!  They thrive in heat and drought conditions and produce fantastic yields. 

Here are some black-eyed peas that are ready for picking.  Once the hulls turn a yellowish color, well, it's time to get out there with a bucket and start picking. 

Right next to the row of black-eyed peas, I have a row of purple hull peas planted.  You can tell how they got their name, can't you?  When the hulls turn purple, they are ready to pick as well.

I filled a large basket with black-eyed peas and had to go back inside to get a bucket to finish with the purple hulls.

Once you've picked them, the fun's just begun.  Now there's pea shellin' to do.  Pea shelling is great therapy, I think.  I like to sit down somewhere with a bowl and release them from the shells into the bowl.  We have an electric pea sheller, but I have to tell ya, I didn't even plug it in this year.  

These in the bowl below are black-eyed peas, as their black eyes testify.

Here is a bucket of purple hulls that are ready to be shelled.

Purple hull peas, once shelled look a little similar to black-eyed peas, but their 'eyes' are more pink, I would say.

This year we put tray after tray of cowpeas in the dehydrator and dried them for a bit.

Once they are fully dried, we pack them in half gallon-sized jars and vacuum seal them.  We have a gallon of peas put up in the pantry.  It's good to have a store of peas.

Growing them is gratifying, for sure.  Picking them is fun.  Shelling them, we've already established, is therapeutic.  But the best doggone part of it is eating them.  Cooking them in a pot with some onions, peppers and some smoked sausage and then serving over a big mound of rice with some homemade corn bread on the side.  Well, I'll tell you what.  You've got a southern meal that can't be beat.  It's comfort food that sticks to your ribs and puts a smile on your face.

I've got to brag on my wife's homemade cornbread.  She tried something new and it was a hit in my book.  She took some sweet corn scraped off the cob with the 'milk' and cut up some fresh jalapenos and added to the batter.  It made a moist, sweet and spicy cornbread that we all enjoyed.

Four Months Later than Normal

It's funny to mention the extreme (for us) cold weather right now when we are experiencing highs in the upper 90's, but this winter we had a cold snap that obliterated the beets, spinach and carrot seedlings that we had coming up.  They were at a tender stage and they just couldn't make it.  I replanted a couple of rows of Danvers Carrots in the early spring to replace those we lost.  Normally we're harvesting carrots in mid-February.  We're four months later than normal, but better late than never.

What I've found is that carrots grown in hotter conditions aren't quite as healthy as the early spring crop normally is.  The ones we harvest seem to be smaller and shorter.  When all was said and done, we had a nice big basket of carrots.

In keeping to the Back to Eden Gardening Method, as soon as we harvested the carrots, we quickly topped the soil with four inches of wood chips.  If you don't know about this method, you can check out more information on it here: Back To Eden Gardening Method Documentary

The wood chips mimic what happens in the forest, keeping the soil covered, reducing compaction, preserving soil moisture, discouraging weed growth, and putting nutrients back in the soil.

We ate lots of the carrots, but we also made a couple quarts of fermented ginger carrots.  It's a dish similar in some ways to Sauer Kraut.  We're about finished with our last jar of Sauer kraut.  We shredded the carrots in a food processor and added minced ginger to the bowl, added salt and whey and stirred.

This is an easy dish to throw together.  You can see the fresh carrots that get shredded.

The ingredients, once mixed are packed tightly into jars.  We like to "beat the carrots up" by pounding on them to release the juices.

Then we put caps on the jars and leave them at room temperature for 3 days.  After three days, we put the jars in the fridge.

We generally let the fermented carrots age in the fridge for a few months.  We find that the taste gets better with age.  Fermented Ginger Carrots has a tangy, cool, refreshing taste to it that is perfect for a side dish on a hot day.

Cast Your Net On the Other Side

My youngest, Benjamin, graduated from college and accepted employment with Phillips 66.  In one last bit of fun before starting work, I looked for a fishing guide service to take us fishing.  I had lots of good memories fishing with my grandpa on Toledo Bend Lake and found a guide service called "Living the Dream."  I scheduled it for last Monday and my Dad, Benjamin, Russ, and I went fishing.

We showed up at 7 AM and walked the gangplank down to the boat.  I saw this placard on the wall of Living the Dream.  My kind of folks...  Traditional values.

We would have a guide who led us to the fish.  He has tree tops sunk at several locations.  He would get us to those points and we would drop our lines.  His fish finder showed the depth and where the fish were.  The fish we would be catching are sacalait (bag of milk), crappie, or white perch.  All the same fish - different names, depending on where you're from.  Our bait was live shiners.

And here's the first mate, Benjamin, with the first fish!

We rode by Southern Leisure Landing and we saw where we used to launch 40 years ago when my grandpa would take us fishing for bream.  What memories!  I can still remember that he'd keep the fish we would catch in the same ice chest as the Shasta soft drinks.  When you'd pop the top on a Black Cherry Soda, it would smell and taste a little like slimy fish.  Yum!!  We put the top down and went under the Pendleton Bridge that connects Texas to Louisiana and we rode past a cove where we would water ski.  Here is Russ looking out over that area.

We were on a pontoon boat.  This one had 3 pontoons - a tri-toon.  It had a cover.  To get under the bridge, you have to put the top down.  There's a story about that I must tell you that is going to sound like a fish story or an excuse, but I promise it is true!  The guide put the net on top of the cover after catching some fish early in the day.  We forgot it up there and took off to the next spot.  The net blew off the top and promptly sunk 29 feet to the bottom of the lake.  We fished the rest of the day without a net and MISSED approximately 8-10 BIG fish that flopped off when we were trying to get them in the boat.  (The ones that got away!)

Once we caught 45 sacalait, 3 yellow bass, and 5 catfish, we headed back to the marina to call it a day.

Our guide, Captain Robert Lewis, took a photo of us.  He did a very good job of getting us on the fish and making sure we had a good time!

As he was fileting the fish, the turtles began swimming in.  The scraps get thrown to them and they get a free meal.  Who turns down a free meal, anyway?

There were more turtles than you could shake a stick at.

Then the big white herons began to swoop down and get the scraps before the turtles could get them.  It was a regular feeding frenzy.

We took a nice photo under the trophy bass on the wall of Living the Dream Guide Service.

What a great day!  We caught some nice fish AND made some great memories!  We'll be having a big fish fry soon...

Tomato Powder

Tomato Powder?  That sounds strange.  Never heard of it.  We'll talk a little about it tonight.  The tomato harvest was so plentiful this season, we ran out of jars!  They are still coming in and we are making and eating pico de gallo and many other tomato dishes as fast as we can, but they are still piling up.

Tricia is making a lot of dehydrated tomatoes with sea salt and rosemary and that gave her an idea.  She decided that we would dehydrate tomatoes and then blend into a powder and can it up.  First we had to purchase some additional trays for the dehydrator.  The silicone liners came in and Tricia made up a big batch of tomato sauce on the stove top.

This time instead of water bath canning the tomato sauce in jars, she poured into the new trays on the dehydrator and turned it on.  After a while, the tomato sauce looked like this:

I'm picking it up and it is dry.  The consistency is like that of Fruit Roll ups or fruit "leather."

The tomato "leather" was broken up and put in a blender where it turned into a rich, aromatic powder!

Here is a closer look at it:

What shall we do with tomato powder?  Well this table tells us:

If you mix equal parts powder and water, you get tomato paste.  1 part powder to 3 parts water, and you get tomato sauce.  You can also make soup and juice.  We are canning tomato powder up as well.