bird seed cookies

based on an oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe from Moosewood.

1 cup cane sugar
1/2 cup butter (microwaved for 1 minute)
1/4 cup veggie oil
2 eggs
(1 teaspoon vanilla extract, I never do tho)
1 cup all purpose or half & half flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
2 1/2 cups rolled oats or five grain mix
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup raisins and/or dried cranberries
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
1/2 cup dried dates, small pieces
1/2 cup flax seeds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds and/or pinenut seeds

combine all ingredients.
with a tablespoon drop batter on baking sheet
push batter flat to about 1/2 inch thick
bake at 375 degrees for 14 minutes or edge of cookie is crisp
cool for about 10 minutes or until cookies firm up in middle

I would have added a picture except we already ate the latest batch!

These are good emergency cookies as well. Healthy enough as a breakfast and / or lunch replacement when on the road! At least I think so...

Coffee & Cream

Meet our two new does, Coffee and Cream (or maybe Cappuccino and Espresso?!). They are a Nubian Saanen cross and most likely pregnant. They're a little younger than I would normally breed (it was an oops) but it is the industry's standard so we'll just go with it this time as older, experienced milking goats are quite valuable - if you can even find one!

And I think we lucked out all around, I found two healthy milking prospects and they did not go to the weekend meat auction! I happened to email just at the right time...

ducks everywhere!

It's been fun having all those duckies around, but man, do they make a mess! I already evicted their water bucket to the outdoors and just wish they would do their multitude of poopies there too...

But, they are fun to watch, tromping down the snowy pasture all in a row, scooting like a penguin under the stall doors to check out the barn isle (and scooting back fast when they see me...), coming to the fence real curious to look at the tiny human, who in turn loves to watch the funny looking and chirping mass of ducks!

They're about 8 weeks old now and some of the boys are already larger than their mom...

quick stew option

Add frozen meat and frozen tomato liquid to stew pot, with a little jar rinsings to help thaw out without sticking to the bottom of the pan.

As I mentioned in the Squashed Deer Stew recipe:
When I can tomatoes, like everyone, to make paste I cut the tomatoes, boil them up but then I remove the liquid with a ladle before the tomato flesh completely disintegrates. That way I don't have to boil the tomatoes forever to remove excess liquid, plus I either can or freeze the liquid to use for other things (stew, soup, etc).

Couple hours later: perfect stew!

Monica, may she rest in peace

I'm real sad to say that our trusty milker Monica died this week...
She was ailing for a while, had milkfever after kidding last spring, had real trouble putting on and keeping on weight over summer and then had a miscarriage followed by milkfever this winter... I tried high nutrient food, extra vitamins, splitting up at feeding just to make sure everyone got what they needed, and just when I thought she was getting over the last set down she died. Poor, poor girl.

In collaboration with Cornell Ambulatory I donated her body to the vet school Anatomy lab. Hopefully an autopsy will reveal what went wrong so I can learn and prevent my other girls from having to go thru a similar ordeal like her. And maybe her remains can help teach the student farm vets...

We're going national!

 

Far Mountain Soap officially opened shop on Etsy.com today :)

visit us at www.etsy.com/shop/FarMountainSoap
to check out the first listing of our best seller milk and honey bars...

which reminds me, we're on Facebook now too!
visit us at www.facebook.com/FarMountainSoap and "like" us.

Squashed Deer Stew

The following is a recipe that evolved from my kid's insistence on not eating anything lumpy & mixed... so I blended it before serving. I also used a short cut to make stew with meat from the freezer without thawing it first, very useful for the busy (and forgetful) mom!

When I can tomatoes, like everyone, to make paste I cut the tomatoes, boil them up but then remove the liquid with a ladle before the tomato flesh completely disintegrates. That way I don't have to boil the tomatoes forever to remove excess liquid, plus I either can or freeze the juice to use for other things (stew, soup, etc).

1 leg of frozen meat, I use goat or deer
1 quart of saved tomato liquid, frozen or canned

Add to cast iron pot (start with a little bit of extra water if liquid is frozen, like rinse out of the bag or jar, to help start thawing the rest) and simmer until meat easily comes of the bones.


Remove all meat and bone from liquid, let cool down on cutting board, when meat is cool, remove from bone, remove squishy parts and cut up in small pieces.

1 butternut squash or medium pumpkin, skinned & cubed.
same amount of sunchokes (jeruzalem artichokes), cubed.

Add cubed squash and sunchokes to liquid and simmer until tender.
When cubes are soft, a fork sticks right thru, blend with stick blender.
When blended add meat back in and heat until all is warm.

We like this with spagetti but it works well with all kinds of pasta. The neat thing is that the paste sticks to the pasta (courtesy of the sunchokes) so the kid has to eat the veggie even if he tries to pick around the sauce :)

Why I call it Squashed Deer Stew?
Cause the deer had a vehicular encounter before ending up as stew...

my sister the soap maker

I just had to share these wonderful little soaps with you! They are the creations of my sister, the first soapmaker in our family and the one who taught me all! Left you see "Pommander", then from top to bottom you see "Mystic Musk", "Berrier Reef" and "Koala Treat".

I love being in charge of her website - yes, I'm Middle Earth Studio as well -  as that gives me a first and often a behind the scenes look of her products. And a change to pretty much try them all as I get samples for the site's product images :)

To see more of her work you can visit her website at www.AtelierCherubijn.nl

home made bread

I bake about two loaves each week for my family and seem to have perfected the recipe enough that the resulting loaves are consistent in shape and taste. My hubbie and kid prefer this bread over the sweetened supermarket bread and it's easy enough to make not to be a weekly hassle for me. So if you'd like to try some, my tweaked recipe follows below:


6 1/2 cups of all purpose or half and half bread flour (whole wheat is too dense to rise well)
1 cup of broken grain cereal (secret ingredient, see pic below)
3 cups warm water (or whey, or potato water, or bean soaking water etc)
1 egg
1 1/2 tablespoon salt
1 full tablespoon yeast
1 tablespoon of some sort of sugar, to proof yeast

Measure 1 cup of warm water, put in separate small bowl. Add yeast and sugar and whisk well. Wait about 5 minutes, or until a layer of foam appears on water surface.

Add flour, grains & salt to mixing bowl. Then add yeast mixture to flour and start mixing.
Immediately add the egg.

Let mixer turn until all the dough is stuck like a ball to the dough hook (because of the egg the bottom will stay stuck to the bowl, don't worry about it).

Remove dough hook and put a hot wet dishcloth over bowl.
Put somewhere warm but not hot for a couple of hours.

When the dough has nicely risen, as in looks like a big mushroom, scrape off from inside bowl, divide in two and put either one in a metal loaf pan (with or without some antistick oil). Push gently in all corners and then LEAVE IT ALONE for another 10 minutes or so (set timer). After 10 minutes it will have recovered handling and started to rise again so stick them into the COLD oven and turn on the heat to about 350 - 375 degrees, for about half an hour to 45 minutes. When the loaf slides around in the pan, is loose, it's done.

The tricks seem to be proofing the yeast, even tho technically it should not need it, adding the egg for more volume, letting the dough recover after putting it in the pan and sticking it in a cold oven so the dough keeps rising while the oven warms up...

But I did just hear about another trick, adding moisture the first third of baking to get a larger fluffier loaf, so that'll be next week's experiment!

a New Year's Treat!

Oliebollen or Dutch Fried Dough, the perfect way to celebrate New Year's - and a perfect treat on such cold days :)

The recipe is from a traditional Dutch cook book (it will tell you how to boil potatoes for instance) and all the recipes are from scratch. They are also in metric, as in grams and liters, but for ease of American cooking I translated the measurements to cups & spoons. Happy Eating!

Put one cup of raisins, black and / or golden, in a container with spiced rum the day before making the dough.

Measure 4 1/2 cups of white or all purpose flour into a mixing bowl.
Add 1 tablespoon of salt.
Measure two cups of milk (or beer!) and warm 1 minute in microwave.
Add 2 tablespoons of yeast to warm milk/beer and mix well (with small whisk).
Add yeast mixture to flour and mix well with dough paddle.
Immediately add 1 egg.
And add the soaked raisins (but not the rum, use that to make more rum raisins).

When all is incorporated well, remove paddle and cover with hot wet towel. Put somewhere warm, like heating vent or wood stove (or closed oven with light on) and leave to rise for at least an hour.

Heat a deep fryer to about 170 degrees Celcius (middle setting, fries setting is too hot).

With two spoons scoop about a clementine's worth of dough, pat semi round and softly lower into frying oil. Do not put in too many at once, they need their space to turn. When the bottom is done, ca 3 minutes, they'll easily flip over, if there is enough room they'll even do it themselves. Enjoy!

The American Doughnut is based on this traditional dutch Fried Dough recipe, as with larger balls and hotter frying oil the center tends to stay sticky & uncooked so the solution was to remove that all together - the hole in the middle - and voila, the doughnut was born :)