Category: Crooked Acres

I completely forgot to answer the question a bunch of you asked the other day – just what IS the average life expectancy of a chicken? I thought for sure I had heard somewhere that chickens can easily live to be twenty years old (!), but a Google search led me to this page which says that average life expectancy is eight years and extreme life expectancy is fifteen years.

Also, a couple asked about eggbound..ness (?). I think of it as being kinda like constipation, only instead of being unable to have a bowel movement, the chicken is unable to pass the egg. There are things you can do to try to help the chicken – putting it in warm water to relax the muscles is one thing, and there’s something else that involves lubricant and a latex glove, and I’ll just let you figure that one out on your own.

(Or read this and laugh your ass off.)

It appears that y’all think the double-bladed mezzaluna (or even the single-bladed) is not worth the space it takes up in the kitchen. See? I’m glad I asked instead of just ordering it and letting it sit in the drawer for a few years before I tossed it out (or put it on the giveaway page)!

Speaking of kitchen appliances, remember last week when I was all “Wah, tomatoes, I hate you! :whinewhinewhine: ?” and reader Michele emailed me and said “Buy this right now, whiny! It will change your life!” and because I am very obedient I was all “Okay, ordered!”

Well, it came Monday. Monday evening before bed I took my two and a half gallon ziplock bag full of ripe tomatoes out of the freezer and left it on the counter to thaw. Mid-morning yesterday I set that tomato strainer up and got started.

Twenty minutes later I had nine cups of tomato puree. Now, let’s compare that with the weekend before last when it took me TWO AND A HALF HOURS of peeling and chopping and foodmilling to come up with 5 1/2 cups of tomato puree.

I am totally a convert. That tomato strainer is MAGIC and Michele is the reader of the week, and since I promised to name a chicken after her if the tomato strainer was as awesome as she claimed….

Meet Michele the chicken!

Okay, Michele the chicken is actually a rooster (and I expect he will father many many pretty babies in his lifetime), but since Charlie and George are girls, I figured it would go along with the naming scheme if we gave the rooster a girl’s name, right?

I could have named one of the newborn chickens Michele, I suppose, but they kind of all look alike at that age, so at least this way I know which chicken we’ve named after her. We’ve been calling him “The tri-color rooster” and “The ‘hey guys’ rooster” (because he’s so curious and friendly), so it’ll be good to have a definite name to call him by.

So, to sum up: Reader Michele = Awesome. Tomato strainer = Awesome. Tri-color Rooster = Michele.

Now, y’all tell me – what is your number one, go-to, absolute favorite kitchen tool?

Fred suggested last week that I try making something with chicken and eggplant, and after MUCH discussion we decided I’d made this eggplant/ chicken parmesan dish consisting of a layer of baked eggplant slices on the bottom of a baking dish, topped with shredded chicken, a good amount of Ragu, another layer of baked eggplant, then shredded mozzarella on top.

So I measured out how much eggplant I’d need, and I baked it, and do you know what happens when you bake eggplant slices? Are you ready for this? It shrinks.

I KNOW. Imagine my shock.

So I didn’t have enough eggplant, and after thinking about it for a minute, I was all “Hey! I’ve got these slices of eggplant in the dehydrator, and they’re not dehydrated all that much! I’ll just use those as is!”

Fred tried to be the voice of reason, all “Shouldn’t you rehydrate them and maybe bake them a little?” and I was all “PSHAW, no! They’ll be fine!”

They were not fine. They tasted like I’d put slices of rubber in there. Also, apparently I don’t like the taste of shredded chicken and Ragu together, because I took one bite and was like “Um, no! I’ll be eating cherry tomatoes and mozzarella for dinner tonight instead!”

So I would call that there experiment a resounding flop.

I’m not cooking dinner tonight, because I have a dental appointment at noon (I’m having a filling removed and re-filled) and then I’m going to Sam’s and then I’m NOT going to come home and cook dinner, so I told Fred he’s on his own. I’ll probably pick up a salad somewhere – unless I still can’t feel my lip from the Novocaine, in which case I don’t suppose I’ll be eating anything for dinner.

Tomorrow night I believe I’m going to make chicken salad. Upon cleaning out the freezer in the kitchen over the weekend, I realized I had several packs of boneless skinless chicken breast halves left over from when I bought them in bulk from Sam’s some time ago, so I want to get them used up. Fred’s been wanting chicken salad (made with the sweet pickle relish I canned last year), so that’s what we’ll be having at least tomorrow night, if not for several nights.

And now I’ve gotta go vacuum the house. I want to get that done before I have to leave for my dental appointment and the Dyson don’t run itself!

(Yet.)

Living dangerously.

Kara is wily. She lays down so the kittens get excited about nursing, then she grooms them, and then she walks off and the kittens sit there like “Wait. I thought it was time to eat! Now I’m all hungry and CLEAN!”

There’s always someone around to jump into the picture and swish their tail by your face at any given moment.

Pretty Kaylee.

Pretty River.

_______________________

Joe Bob made himself a nest, and Inara came along to see what he was doing, and hissed at him. He was like “And your point is?”

_______________________

Previously
2007: (Miz Poo, upon seeing me pick up a fly swatter and walk toward her, whines and runs away. Like I beat her spoiled ass on a regular basis! I don’t, but I oughta. She deserves it.)
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: The morning I wake up and find a cricket in bed with me is the day I start closing the cat door at night, believe you me.
2003: I HAVE THINGS TO DO THAT CANNOT BE ACCOMPLISHED WITH A PORTLY POO IN THE WAY.
2002: No entry.
2001: Yeah, like YOU don’t have a voice in your head that reads things to you…
2000: No entry.

Oh tomatoes, how you PISS ME OFF. I know that Roma tomatoes are considered the best tomatoes for making tomato sauce and such, but if the fucking things won’t grow any bigger than two inches long and after peeling and seeding them, I get maybe a pea-sized amount of tomato meat off each tomato, WHAT IS THE FUCKING POINT?

I spent two and a half hours on Saturday peeling and seeding tomatoes, and before I began I was all kinds of thrilled because I was looking forward to making this tomato sauce. We never got enough tomatoes to make as much tomato sauce as I wanted last year, so this year Fred planted a million tomato plants and they’ve slowly started coming in and I’ve been popping them in plastic bags and putting them in the freezer, because once tomatoes are frozen and thawed, the skin slips right off and you don’t have to blanch them.

So after two and a half hours of peeling and seeding and chopping out the stems, I ran everything I had through the food mill, because that recipe calls for 10 quarts of tomato puree to start. Know how much tomato puree I ended up with?

Five and a half cups. Not even a quart and a half.

“How is this possible?” Fred asked when I presented him with the evidence. “Ragu is a buck a bottle. It should cost like a thousand dollars!”

No shit.

So I put the puree in a freezer bag and froze it, and maybe after another couple of months and 130 hours of effort, perhaps I’ll end up with enough tomato puree.

UGH.

DAMN YOU, TOMATOES.

What I accomplished this weekend, in pictures.

Dehydrated eggplant slices to rehydrate and use as lasagna noodles this winter.

Dehydrated cherry tomatoes to use in stir-fries and chili this winter.

Canned tomato juice. I don’t know what on earth I’ll use this stuff for (certainly not for drinking), but it seemed a shame to let it go to waste.

Fred made his first batch of strawberry habanero jam of the year. He says it’s particularly good. I myself didn’t try it – I prefer not to sizzle my taste buds right out of my mouth.

Also, I vacuumed the house and did laundry and hung out with the kittens, but I have no pictures of those exciting activities. I also took a Saturday afternoon nap with Kaylee flopped across my stomach. I love that damn kitten.

Summer squash season, at least for the And3rsons, is over. We’ve got enough put away until next year, so we were just eating it as it came in, but the squash bugs completely infested the plants (and the squash), and when Fred brought squash in yesterday, all of it had holes in it (and some even had squash bugs still rooting around inside the squash, yum!), so he spent the afternoon yanking up the squash plants.

We never did get much zucchini, though I got several cups of shredded frozen before the squash bugs had their way with the squash. Squashes? You know what I mean.

Speaking of zucchini, a few weeks ago Webster asked if I wanted her chocolate zucchini bundt cake recipe from Sunset Magazine, and of course I said yes, so she shared it with me, and this past weekend I made it.

It’s really good! Fred tried it, and he said “There’s an interesting flavor… it’s familiar, I can’t think of what it is…” and I said “It’s got orange peel in it” and he said “That’s it!” I like the very slight orange flavor and the slight cinnamon flavor, and the glaze could not have been easier to make and drizzle (I put the glaze in a plastic sandwich bag and cut a hole in one corner and drizzled away, ’cause I’m fancy like that).

So, thanks Webster! In the middle of the winter I’ll pull some shredded zucchini out of the freezer and make the cake again, and it’ll taste like summer to us.

This here is the recipe, if you’re interested.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: Y’all are good for my yellow ego!
2005: Maine recap.
2004: Hawaii recap.
2003: Maine recap.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: The cats are suddenly deciding to take closed doors as a personal affront.

Some days I feel like the stream of dirty dishes is endless and I do nothing all goddamn day long but wash dish after dish after dish, dry them, put them away, and then – bingo! – the sink is full of dishes again.

Yesterday was one of those days. Fred harvested the navy beans last weekend, and I looked around online for a canned baked bean recipe, and so yesterday I spent all day making the goddamn things which involved washing the beans, measuring them, figuring out how much water to add, bringing the water (with beans) to a boil, letting them sit for an hour, draining them, adding them back to the pot with fresh water, bringing the water to a boil again, then draining them while reserving the liquid and good god, what a pain in the ass.

I love – LOVE – baked beans, and last year after we harvested the black-eyed peas I said “What kind of beans do you use to make baked beans? Let’s grow some of those!” So earlier this year Fred put navy beans on the grocery list and I bought a bag of dried navy beans, and we planted half of them in the garden.

(I’m sorry, is it not fucking AWESOME that you can buy a bag of beans at the grocery store, plant them, and have them GROW? I’ll never get over that.)

After the harvested beans were – what the fuck is the word I’m looking for? De-podded? There’s a word, I just cannot think of it. I’m ovulating and have Stupid Brain today. YOU’RE WELCOME. – removed from their pods and ready to go, I weighed what we had, and we ended up with four and a half pounds. Four and a half pounds from half a pound planted. Not shabby, I guess, though Fred thinks if he were to pick the pods when they were done growing instead of leaving them to dry on the bush, we might have ended up with more.

So I found this recipe for making your own canned baked beans, and first the issue was that Fred doesn’t like molasses, but we got the suggestion from a canning guru on the forum where he hangs out to substitute honey or brown sugar for the molasses, then once I got to the part where the beans were baking in the oven, I thought about the fact that there’s 3 tablespoons of honey for 4 1/2 pounds of navy beans, and I don’t know much but I’m pretty sure that the baked beans we usually use are way sweeter than 3 tablespoons would make them.

We usually eat Bush’s Baked Beans, for the record.

I spent some time looking around online after my beans had been in the oven for a few hours, and stumbled upon a site where someone claimed that they used the baked bean recipe in the Ball Blue Book, and when they substituted maple syrup for the molasses, it tasted exactly like the Bush’s baked beans. Since my baked beans were already in the oven with their honey sauce, I decided I’d grab a bag of navy beans at the grocery store when I go on Thursday and try that version of baked beans.

Meantime, I had to take the beans out of the oven every hour to make sure they were covered with liquid, and since I was using a flimsy foil pan, every time I took them out of the oven I dumped liquid and beans on the bottom of the oven, which burned. You can imagine how fantastic my house was smelling by then.

With the beans finally done cooking at around 3:00, I got them canned (well, half of them canned. 5 pounds of navy beans makes about 7 quart-size canning jars; my pressure canner only holds 4 jars at a time, so I had to put the uncanned beans in a plastic container to can at a future date (probably later today). When Fred got home, he tasted the beans and declared that they just tasted like cooked beans, not like there was any honey or spices in there at all.

Grrrr.

We talked about it some more, and I think that when I can the second half of the beans, I may stir some BBQ sauce in with them to improve the flavor. I don’t know. Those of you who know about canning and baked beans – hell, even those of you who don’t – what would you recommend I do? Suggestions? I don’t want these beans to go to waste!

So in and amongst all the bean baking and canning, I put the leftover chicken from Sunday’s lunch on to simmer for a few hours so I could pick the chicken off the bones and make chicken and rice casserole. I was concerned that there wouldn’t be enough chicken meat to make a small batch of the casserole, but there was enough, and after we ate it for dinner last night, we had enough left over for another night.

Tonight, I’m making a stuffed pattypan squash for myself and a stuffed green pepper for Fred. And some oven-fried squash and green tomato.

Ordinarily before I go get groceries on Sunday, we make a list of the meals we want to have throughout the week, but this past Sunday I decided to just figure it out as the week went along, and if I had to run to the store to get something, it’s only a five minute drive to the crappy grocery store. So far, I haven’t had to get a thing – between our garden and our chickens, we’ve pretty much been all set this week.

I love it when that happens.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: I really REALLY want a monkeypod tree for my back yard.
2003: Bonus entry, just for you!
2002: Sit on it.
2001: Packing, packing, packing.
2000: No entry.

I finally posted an entry at OneFatBitchypoo, and at the bottom there’s a link to my surgery before-and-after pictures. No underwear pics, though, ya pervs.

I’m plenty pleased with my results.

Almost two years ago when we bought this house, we bought it with the intention of making a life for ourselves that was both simpler and a lot more work. We wanted to go from a McMansion house on a tiny bit of land to a smaller house that suited us better on a lot more land. Land we could use to feed ourselves. With that in mind, we planted a garden to provide us with vegetables and we bought chickens to provide us with eggs and eventually meat.

This summer, there’s been a disconnect between what we’d intended and what we’d accomplished – that is, we were getting plenty of vegetables from the garden, and eating them and putting them away for the winter, we were eating lots of eggs (I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of scrambled eggs), and our chicken population was growing by leaps and bounds.

But we weren’t killing and eating chickens the way we’d intended. At first, we didn’t kill any of our first batch of chickens because they were providing us so nicely with eggs and even enough that we could occasionally sell some. Then we got the second batch of chickens, and we still didn’t eat any chickens, because we were waiting for our second batch to start laying.

With every meal, the disconnect grew. We were eating vegetables we’d grown ourselves on plates next to factory-grown chickens who assuredly don’t live the life of Riley the ways ours do.

And then we realized that Flappy, after providing us with the super-freaky double egg, stopped laying altogether. Fred suggested that we use her as our “test” chicken, to see if we had the intestinal fortitude to eat our own chickens. I put him off for a while, but this past week he got insistent. It was apparently time to put our money where our mouths were. Were we going to be able to kill and eat one of our own chickens, or should we just make little beds for them in the house and start treating them like pets?

We talked about doing it early Friday morning, but Fred was afraid that he’d lay awake all night fretting about it, so when he got home Thursday from work, he declared that it was time. We went out and tried to catch Flappy.

Flappy – always a bit of a spaz – dodged and feinted and weaved and hid under the chicken coop. I don’t for one minute believe that she had any idea what was coming, just that these big lumbering idiots were trying to touch her and she DID NOT WANT. After a few tries, I noticed that there was an unused gate leaned up against the chicken coop, and I grabbed it and it helped immeasurably in cornering her.

Fred picked her up, and she was completely calm and docile. We walked through the chicken yard to a spot over by the garden where Fred had put the big tree stump we were going to use. It wasn’t until this point that I started getting butterflies in my stomach. I’d occasionally thought during the day of what we were going to do, but hadn’t dwelt on it. Fred and I are polar opposites when it comes to this sort of thing – he dreads it all the way up until the moment of, and then he’s okay; I’m okay right up until the moment of.

Fred put her down on the stump, her head between two nails. She remained completely calm, and I lifted the hatchet to do the chop, and she blinked up at me. Something about seeing her blink made the voice in my head scream “NO WAY”, but then I thought “I have to”, and a moment later it was done. Then I turned and walked away a little and lost it for a moment.

Fred wrote that I preferred to do the actual chopping rather than hold her body, but in actuality I volunteered to do the chopping because then I wouldn’t feel bad about going inside and letting him deal with the feathers and guts. He never suggested that I do the chop; it was my idea. I never really doubted that I could do it, but I didn’t ENJOY it or look forward to it.

I suspect that it surprises a lot of people that I would be willing to do the killing myself, and that I’ll be doing it again in the future. It surprises me that it surprises you. Though they’re very entertaining to watch, and I like Frick a LOT (Frick is absolutely never going to become dinner; she’s too much like a little puppy, and I get to play favorites if I want to) and I am without a doubt an animal lover, I don’t consider the chickens to be our pets. They’re a food source, and they’ll be spoiled rotten as long as they’re with us, but in the end they’re going to be eaten.

That’s what they’re for.

(Fred wrote about the process in a little more detail, if you’re interested.)

The disconcerting thing to me was how at 4:00 Flappy looked like any ol’ chicken running around, and an hour later she looked like a chicken you’d see in the grocery store. I don’t know what I expected her to look like, but apparently I didn’t expect her to look like that.

Once Fred cleaned her, we put her in a bag in the refrigerator, then on Saturday I made a brine and put her in it. For Sunday lunch, we had roasted chicken, deviled eggs (made with our eggs and pickle relish I canned last year), green beans, oven-fried yellow and pattypan squash, corn on the cob, and sliced tomatoes. Everything grown in our garden or in our chicken yard.

Fred’s plate:

It was fabulous.

Back when we named the pigs (and we never ever call them by name, by the way – they’re just “the big pig” and “the pushy little bastard pig” to us these days), people warned us that naming them would ensure we’d never eat them.

Well.

We named Flappy, and not only did we eat her, we called her by name right up until the moment we ate her – and even while we were eating her, as a matter of fact. So apparently naming animals doesn’t stop US from eating them.

Out of curiosity – anyone still think we won’t eat those pigs?

“Be vewwy quiet, girlies. It will come closer and I will GET IT! Watch Mama at work!”

Something hath disturbed the Boogs.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: Handwritten.
2002: No entry.
2001: No entry.
2000: Jemima J.

This weekend, I noticed when I was standing in the chicken yard feeding them whatever the hell I was feeding them (they are SO spoiled rotten that now when I toss some cherry tomatoes in the chicken yard they look at me and are all “Whatevs. You got anything more… grainy? Some cornmeal, perhaps?”), it was particularly stinky. I chalked it up to the fact that we have way too many chickens now and chickens = chicken poop = STANK, and thought no more of it.

Sunday, Fred said “Can you come out here?”, and when I obediently walked onto the side stoop, he said “Does it smell like something dead out here?” I sniffed and sniffed and sniffed some more, but I smelled nothing at all. Which is unusual, since I can smell the smallest amount of cat pee from three rooms away and he doesn’t notice it if he’s sitting in a big puddle of it.

All day long he kept insisting that it smelled like death outside, and I would sniff and shrug ’cause I didn’t smell a damn thing.

Finally, Sunday afternoon while I was making dinner, he said “There is SOMETHING dead out there, and I’m going to find out what the hell it is!” He went out and I returned to making dinner hoping it wasn’t a person, a cat, or one of our chickens.

A few minutes later he returned to report that it was a dead armadillo, but that – luckily, I suppose – it was actually on church property.

Every year for as long as I can remember, we’ve passed at least one dead armadillo by the side of the road (in various places) and every time we’ve seen one, Fred has said “Huh. An armadillo. Weird. They don’t usually come this far north!”

A few months ago we started noticing spots out under the tree near the pig yard where something had clearly been digging. I suggested that maybe it was an armadillo, and Fred said it could be, but “They don’t usually come this far north.”

I think someone better tell the armadillos they don’t come this far north, ’cause they don’t seem to be aware of the rules.

So the corn, as you may have seen in yesterday’s entry, was harvested over the weekend. We planted, I think, twice as much corn this year as last, but ended up with about the same amount of corn. I don’t know why we didn’t get more – Fred thinks he might have planted them too close together. Last year, we froze a bunch of ears of corn still in the husk and when we ate them this spring, they were fabulous. I wanted to do the same with most of the corn this year, but when Fred checked a couple of ears, he found bugs or worms in every one of them. Since I prefer not to freeze ears of corn in the husk if there are bugs in there (just call me picky), he husked all the corn.

We thought at first that just the white corn he’d planted – Silver Queen – was going to be ready to be harvested and the rest would take a few more weeks, but at the end of the day Saturday, after I’d blanched and frozen all the Silver Queen, he brought in a couple of ears of the other kind he’d planted – Golden Queen – and announced that it was ready, too.

“Can we wait until tomorrow to pick it, please?” I begged. I’d been pickling and chopping and blanching and freezing all day long and hadn’t had time to even vacuum the house, which desperately needed to be done.

So he kindly waited until Sunday to harvest the Golden Queen (a few test ears showed plenty of bugs and worms in this corn as well), and after I vacuumed the house and got groceries, I started using the vegetable brush on the corn to get as much of the silk off it as I could. About a third of the way through desilking the ears piled in the sink, I asked Fred if he’d do the rest of the ears while I ran to the recycling center and to Big Lots. He agreed (but gave me a dirty look. Puh-lease.), and I left for my errands.

I had to stop by Big Lots, because for the last couple of years – ever since I vacationed in Gatlinburg at Christmas time with my sister, nephew, and parents – I’ve been using SunSilk De-Frizz 24/7 Creme on my hair after my shower, and of course it’s either no longer made or just no longer carried in my area.

OF COURSE.

(Though a quick Google search indicates that it might be available at Walgreens, so I’ll be needing to check there, I s’pose.)

The only place I’ve seen it in recent months is at Big Lots, so I thought I’d stop by and get as many bottles as I could.

But of course Big Lots didn’t have any, so I bought a couple of bottles of other stuff to try, and now I’m carefully using as little of the De-Frizz creme as possible every morning, to make it last as long as possible.

Anyway.

So I got back to the house to find that Fred had finished the ears of corn, so I began the corn-blanching cycle, followed up by the laying-corn-everywhere cycle (I use a FoodSaver when I freeze food, and so try to get everything as dry as I can before I start using the machine to suck air out of the bags before it seals them – it can handle moist foods, but too-wet foods mess up the process) and then made yellow squash pickles and so on.

I was well into the yellow squash pickles-making cycle when I realized that the recipe (which Fred got from his stepmother last year) said that I should add vinegar to the other ingredients, but didn’t specify how much vinegar or whether it was white or apple cider vinegar. A call to Fred’s stepmother didn’t help, because she looked at her recipe to find that her mother hadn’t written that information down, either, but as soon as he hung up the phone, I found the exact same recipe online.

We are seriously full up on yellow squash until next year (to prepare it for use over the fall and winter, I just dice it and freeze it raw. A lot of people refuse to preserve yellow squash, saying that it gets gross and bland, but we ate it all fall, winter, and spring, and it was just fine made in a saute with onion and dehydrated cherry tomatoes), so Fred pulled up the yellow squash plants that aren’t producing as much (I think he pulled up like three plants out of 53. YES HE PLANTED 53!). From here on out, we’ll eat squash fresh out of the garden several times a week, slice the larger yellow squash in half for the chickens (they really like the seeds, and when I slice the squash in half they end up eating everything but the skin), and if there’s anything left over we’ll feed it to the pigs.

We still haven’t gotten nearly enough zucchini for my taste, though, so I’ll keep freezing those for future use as they come in.

Next, the tomatoes should start coming in with a vengeance, and soon after that I think the okra are due to start coming in. Also, I think Fred’s going to pull the onions and potatoes this weekend.

Mid-July, and we’re already talking about what we want to plant in the Fall garden!

“Rowr. Rowr, I say.”

Tommy adores hiding in the whatever-it-is growing in this corner of the yard. Every few days I think he’s escaped the back yard and run around looking for him, only to find him sitting here watching me. Brat.

Previously
2007: No entry.
2006: No entry.
2005: “Bessie,” he said. “That is CAT POOP, not kitty treats!”
2004: No entry.
2003: No entry.
2002: Our kitties, spoiled? Nah.
2001: No entry.
2000: No entry.