Mulberry bread & mowing the lawn

We have a friend who comes and works on our farm in exchange for eggs, chickens, turkeys, etc. He is my very favorite person most days because he keeps Ryan working and motivated! Anyway, he has a myriad of food allergies that make it very hard to cook lunch for him. He is lactose intolerant and also allergic to soy, tomatoes, fish, and pesticide residue. This means honey and sugar are also out because of the residue unless they are organic and even then they are to be used sparingly. So here is what I made for him as a special treat: mulberry bread!

It may be the ugliest thing I ever baked. It looked like a purple-black miasma of goo when I was done with it, but it was surprisingly edible. I followed my A-to-Z bread recipe, which a similar recipe can be found here. I cut out all the sugar, though, and wouldn't advise that for anyone making this recipe. I thought the mulberries would add some sweetness, but the bread badly needed some sweetener when it was done. Ryan put honey on it and ate it anyway, but the man is a human vacuum so that doesn't surprise me.

One of my favorite reasons for living out in the country is that I don't have to mow the lawn all the time. There are no city ordinances or neighbors or anything. So I can let my lawn start to look like this:

This is particularly handy when we have 3 (not one, not two, but three) mowers on this farm and only the non-power-assist-push-mower-that-kicks-my-butt works.

But eventually Ryan decides that he cares how our lawn looks, so here it is after I mowed it with the mower deck all the way up:

This was made possible by Ryan's wonderful grandmother who took pity on our poor lawn and let us have her riding mower. Yay for the people in our lives who help us!!!

Hazel, Oatmeal, & fabric organization

As most of my readers probably know, my short hiatus the last couple of weeks was because I had a little girl, Hazel. This picture is of my personal favorite facial expression of hers because I think she looks like she is trying to solve the world's problems. It's especially ironic that this picture was taken on the changing table. But this is not a baby blog, so I will not be putting lots of pictures of Hazel on it. It is a quilting and farm life blog with some thoughts on sustainability thrown in for spice.

Speaking of sustainability, I am increasingly convinced that oatmeal is really a Super Food.

This is my breakfast every morning, and we buy our oatmeal from Paul's Grains in Marshalltown. Between one annual checkup and the next I started eating oatmeal every morning and my cholesterol dropped 40 points. That was amazing, but seemed like a reasonable thing to expect. But now that I've been looking at baby articles, etc, I'm learning that oatmeal also boosts breastmilk production. Really? That's crazy! I'm finding myself wondering what else this stuff does. Is there a drawback? As a side note, people say they don't have time to make oatmeal before work. You're right, neither do I. But we've found we can make a big batch on the weekend and then store it in a container in the fridge, dishing it out like leftovers and heating it in the microwave. It works great!

Lastly, on the quilting front I haven't gotten much done recently (I wonder why...) but one main goal I had for my maternity leave was to reorganize the space that I have now that my craft room has become the baby's room. So while my good friend Leah was visiting me yesterday, she helped me figure out how to get all my fabric into my new smaller space. She even sat and folded it with me (how great a friend is that)?! So now the three foot pile of fabric has been cleared from my table and I'm one step closer to getting back in the quilting groove.

Morel season again

It's morel mushroom season again! So far, they're still the only mushroom Ryan will eat. Here is how I cook morels, which is incidentally also how I bread chicken, or pork chops, or anything I feel needs breading.

First, you have to clean these wrinkly little morsels of goodness. Get inside 'em, there be bugs in there!

Then, I cut them in half. Otherwise the yummy breading won't cover everything.

Next, they go in a mix of flour, salt, and pepper. They get a good coating, but then I shake them off best I can.

Their second coating is some of our farm fresh eggs, beaten.

Then last they go back into a mix of flour, salt, and pepper. I like to have some of the flour be spelt or whole wheat (but not all of it! The gluten in all purpose flour is needed to help keep the breading together!)

Now they go into my saute pan in a mix of olive oil & butter. I mix the two because the olive oil raises the smoke point of the pan, but the butter adds yummy flavor. Cook on low-med until golden brown and delicious!

I almost put some garnish in the bowl for this picture, but I believe cooking should look like it actually does by those of us who aren't pros. So these may not look like much, but I promise they are creamy and delish.

With spring comes activity & 181 fluffballs

It is definitely spring around here. My favorite tree the flowering crabapple is blooming, some day perhaps I'll have a dozen of those or so in my yard.

Some of my most recent heritage bulbs are coming up, including this cute little pink hyacinth called "Double Hollyhock" also from Old House Gardens.

Ryan has been in a flurry of activity with the spring, too. Here he is treating boards with linseed oil to help them last. He also re-mulched our swampy rhubarb patch and filled in some holes in the rhubarb where chickens had beaten up rhubarb plants. Perhaps those plants were buggy and they were doing us a favor... The one thing I have learned here is that chickens love mulch. Love it. It is a nest, it is a food source, it is a place of dust baths. Mulch seldom lasts well around our farm, but we do it anyway. Why? Because it is cheap (free!) because I work at Vermeer, maker of many brush chippers; and because it is a chemical-free way to keep weeds down. Not to mention, if chickens are tearing up my mulch they are ignoring my strawberries. Layer chickens are smarter than the broiler chickens, but they do still only have the capacity to focus on one thing at a time. They are just not born multitaskers.

This week we also received our first 181 little yellow fluffballs. The question I keep getting here is: Why 181? Well, we ordered 175. But in the interest of customer satisfaction, the hatchery always throws in a random number of extra chicks in case some don't survive shipping. In our case, I don't think we've ever lost many (if any) in transit, but this way if we do the hatchery hasn't upset us by shorting us chicks. So now we have 181, and they will be this cute for about a week before they start growing and get a lot less cute.

Dinner Bell

I think it's the city kid in me. I think it's very important that a "real" farm has a dinner bell. It's silly, but it's important to me! So bless Ryan, he's been looking for a decent bell since the day we bought this place. He finally found one and today he installed it. So now when dinner is ready I can be a "real farm wife" and summon my husband by dinner bell!

Successful slipcover & deer on the move

Today I tackled a project I've been meaning to do for almost a year. I swear, no one goes through jeans like Ryan. About once a year I make a throw sized quilt out of all the jeans he wears out, but this year I made a slipcover for our cheap IKEA sofa! We got this sofa about and year ago and it was inexpensive and great; but it only came in white. White. Like white is going to survive in this house with 3 pets and a baby on the way. So we've been using one of those throws I made out of Ryan's jeans tossed over it to somewhat protect it, but it always fell off and wasn't big enough for the whole love seat. But in prep for the baby coming, I have to move all my sewing stuff including the massive pile of Ryan's jeans. This means I can either find a new way to store them in a smaller space, or just get the project done! Is the result perfect? No. Are the corners square and the seams straight? No. But did I successfully make a custom slipcover without even the internet to help and no pattern? Yes! So there.

In other news, the deer have been very active in the yard and we have had a couple within tossing distance of the house twice in the last two days. This morning they seemed oddly alarmed and antsy, and we couldn't figure out why until Ryan spotted Nermal bounding toward the deer. That's right: our little tabby cat has decided that he is a carnivore and the deer are herbivores and therefore it is his prerogative and duty to chase them. I wonder what his plans are if he catches one...

Hay Feeding

I have recently been inspired by this blog: Pioneer Woman and so I'm going to post a little bit more like she does and see how that goes. No promises about maintaining this, just an experiment. If you like it, let me know!

Ryan currently is feeding hay from the bales he had made last fall, but we're still low tech around here. So here is how to feed a small flock of sheep with a bale of hay:

Unroll your bale a little and grab a pitchfork. We searched auctions for months for a decent pitchfork, but I think we ended up just paying the $60 for this one new. It's surprisingly hard to find a pitchfork at auction in decent shape.

Move some hay onto a tarp, basically whatever you can tote around.

Pause to contemplate life while the ram and cows behind you try to figure out how to get some of this fresh hay.

Haul your tarp down the hill. The ram still wants some, so smile at him as you walk on by.

Wrestle the tarp in through the sheep pen gate. Today, only one got out so we're doing pretty good! Luckily the lazy photographer could reroute her back into the corral.

Slide the tarp out from under the hay. This one's tricky because the sheep like to stand on the tarp. So the old "pulling the tablecloth off the table while it's set" trick comes in useful.

Stand back and admire your handiwork again. That and think about how the pastures are almost ready to be done with the whole hauling hay thing and the ewes will soon have fresh grass to eat.

So now it's time to go feed the ram and cows before they bust down the fence in search of hay.