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Hi Everyone,
It is lambing season here on the farm and as Papa puts it our sheep population is multiplying. For the past week ewe’s have been giving birth to some of the cutest little lambs—some singles and some twins. I heard that the last count was six lambs. It is so cute to see them hoping and skipping all over the place, and even trying to bounce off their mother’s backs. Usually by February there are “mobs” of lambs frolicking around the fields together.
A week ago I planted some carrot seeds that if the Lord blesses them to grow should be harvested come spring. Last Monday I harvested the carrots that I planted the end of August. They were probably ready to harvest a month ago—but life was too busy. Papa helped me pull up all the carrots—he told Mama that we only pulled up 50 carrots. When I heard that I laughed, for it was like 50 times five or six. Then Steve helped me cut all the tops off. Once the carrots were trimmed up Steve and I grabbed two plastic totes and two bags of playground sand and began to layer the carrots in the totes: a layer of sand, a layer of carrots, a layer of sand, a layer of carrots until the tote was full. It was a pretty BIG tote and filling it up with carrots and sand was the easy part—then Papa and Steve had to carry it into the walk-in cooler which was easier said than done. The bags of sand weigh 50 pounds and I know that we put more than one bag in the big tote—plus the carrots. The fall carrots are our year’s supply of carrots—and sometimes they last longer than a year for I am still finishing off last year’s carrots. They last really well and stay nice and crispy stored in the sand. Not all of the carrots fit into the totes though—and those I will slice and dehydrate to use in broth making. After dinner at night when I am ready to put a batch of chicken bones in a stock pot to cook all night in the oven I do not feel like peeling and cutting up carrots. So I keep dehydrated carrots and celery leaves on hand for just such occasions. I like to have dehydrated onions too—but I never seem to put up enough of those. I need to be dehydrating some of the green onions that are growing in the garden right now—but I forget. The parsley and the sage are ready for harvesting and drying also.
While I was working with the carrots, Mama was inside baking cookies and making Roselle jello for our Christmas Eve Dinner with my siblings. Mama made some:
Holiday Cranberry Pecan Macaroons
Ingredients
2 egg whites
⅓ cup maple sugar
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract / or ½ a vanilla bean
¼ teaspoon salt
2 cups unsweetened shredded coconut
⅓ cup dried cranberries, chopped (or dried cherries/apples/apricots)
¼ cup chopped pecans/walnuts
¼ teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon orange/lemon/lime zest
Instructions
· Preheat oven to 325F.
· Whisk egg whites in a small bowl for about a minute until white and frothy. Add in sugar, vanilla, salt, and any optional add-ins. Whisk again.
· Add coconut, cranberries, and nuts. Fold to coat evenly.
· On parchment-lined baking sheet, form 1 – 1 ½ tablespoon-sized mounds, using dampened hands, if needed.
· Bake in preheated oven for 16-20 minutes or until golden brown. Set pan on cooling rack for 5 minutes before transferring cookies to rack to finish cooling.
When she finished baking the cookies she brought some out for Steve and me to taste test. Steve didn’t want to eat his right then, so he told Mama to put it in his coat pocket—for he knew it was clean since he had just washed it that morning. Well . . . he was dealing with bags of sand at that moment and he said that on his way home when he was eating his cookie all was going well until right at the end and he started crunching on a lot of sand. YUCK!
Christmas Eve day was spent in the kitchen—all day for Mama, and the rest of the day for me once I finished milking the cows. We had made up the menu Monday morning, and Tuesday morning while I was still in bed I started to realize that there was a big possibility that we would run into some cooking time and temperature problems. I was grateful for two ovens—but one would be occupied for six hours, so we had to use our time wisely. I needed the brisket to go in the oven at 11:15, so that it would be done by 5:15 so that I could raise the temp and cook the broccoli soufflé and have it done by 6:00 (when we planned to eat dinner). That meant that Mama needed to bake the pumpkin pie and the pear crisp while I milked the cows since both cooked at different temperatures. When I came in from milking Mom was still working on the pumpkin pie. She had troubles with the crust. It was 11:00 and I had to get the brisket in the oven at 250 to cook for six hours (I always cook my roasts frozen on a low temp for a long time). While the pumpkin pie cooked Mama took the extra pie dough (the recipe made two crusts but we only needed one) and turned them into cut out cookies. Mama grew up with her Mama making cookies out of left over pie dough, and I grew up with my Mama making cookies out of left over pie dough. It is really easy, for you just roll out the pie dough and cut your shapes—we usually just do strips, but since it was Christmas we used the heart, star and gingerbread boy cookie cutters—and then you sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar and bake till done. Once the cookies and the pie were done cooking we made the pear crisp and baked it. By that time my two brothers had arrived to spend the day with us. My brother David went with me to the garden to harvest some collard greens for dinner. Then it was time for the egg party—for it was Tuesday after all. As soon as the eggs were done (well all the clean ones packaged) I scrambled back over to the kitchen to make some carrot salad. By the time I finished that it was going on 4:00 and reality—or panic started to set in. Would we really be able to make the salad with fresh lettuce from the garden, get the broccoli soufflé assembled by 5:15, the oven-fried drumsticks in the oven by 5:00 and the scalloped potatoes in the oven by 5:20? Yes we did, but just as I was about to breathe a sigh of relief I realized that I still needed to peel the apples and sweet potatoes and get them in the Instant Pot—which thankfully only takes 5 minutes on steam to cook them. It was 5:30 and my sister, Nichole, and her family had just arrived. My brother-in-law, Gary, teased me because I was still cooking—and I just told him to be quiet. Just as I got the sweet potatoes cooking I saw the pile of washed collard greens, and we were supposed to eat in 20 minutes. I quickly got them going and realized that dinner would be a little late because of them. Then while we were cutting up the brisket, getting the table set and making sure everything was done I realized that I had forgotten the green beans. Once again I was grateful for our home canned green beans that all I had to do was dump them in a pot and turn it on high and bring them to a boil—done in 5 to 10 minutes. It was 6:35 when we called the family to the kitchen to serve their plates. Thankfully we did remember to serve the Roselle jello that Mama had made the day before and the Pineapple/Orange jello that I had made the night before. It all tasted really good and I was amazed at the amount of food on my plate. It has been ages since I ate so much because usually when we attend a feast Mama and I can eat very little due to our allergies—but since we cooked the whole meal, we could eat everything. Come dessert time Mama slipped outside to see if her package had arrived. She had heard about a Stainless steel whipping cream dispenser and she just had to have one for the pumpkin pie—so she ordered it Monday and was anxiously awaiting its arrival all day Tuesday. To her delight when she went outside after dinner the package was there waiting for her. She brought it in and opened it and I headed over to the cooler to get a gallon of milk so that we could steal the cream from it. The whipping cream dispenser works pretty easy—fill up with cream, attach lid, shake, dump upside down, slowly squeeze trigger and out comes whipped cream. There was one step that Mama didn’t know about though—dump it upside down when you pull the trigger. My brother David told her that she should test it outside first, but she did it in the kitchen sink and all went well. So she turned around and went to put it on the first piece of pie and it shot across the kitchen and splattered all over my brother Charles and the floor and the cabinets. Oops! We all laughed so hard. Papa took over and it came out perfectly. After a little while Mama attempted it again, and this time Charles decided to stand on the other side of the kitchen behind her. The whipped cream came out with such force that it hit the crust of the pie and backfired up and landed on Charles again. We had another good laugh! After dinner some of us worked on a puzzle and some talked, but around 8:30 to 9:00 everyone went home—and the kitchen was a mess! Spending all day in the kitchen cooking isn’t too bad—but spending all night in the kitchen doing dishes is not the grandest. Thankfully we have a dishwasher and Mama and I worked together to get done what we could. The rest would be there tomorrow, was our saying.
We got up at 6:00 Christmas morning and headed outside to milk so that Steve wouldn’t be here all afternoon washing the milking equipment—no there are no days off on a farm, the cows have to be milked every day and the chickens have to be fed and moved. We have been working on training Dolly, a young heifer that is due in January, to be tied in when she comes into the parlor to eat. She learned to come in and eat a long time ago—but she backs out and leaves and then comes back in and then backs out and leaves the whole time she eats. So before Dolly calves she has to be trained to come in and be tied in and stay put. We had put a halter on her Tuesday, and come Wednesday she decided that she didn’t want to come in at all. I had just brought in Melba (on Mama’s side) and Bonnie (on my side) to be milked. Bonnie was dirty so I had to give her a bath first. Then I saw Dolly and decided to have Papa bring her in real quick so that she could eat in the empty stall while I milked. The key word was “Real quick.” Fifteen minutes later, after much dragging, pulling and pushing we had Dolly in her stall eating—but Bonnie and Melba had finished eating and I hadn’t even started milking them. I realized that I had made a bad decision and for the next 20 minutes Papa and I would suffer the consequences. When a cow gets stressed she poos and when a cow finishes eating she poos. Melba was pooing because she was finished eating, and Bonnie was pooing because she was stressed. Papa couldn’t manage to catch it all—and I say all because as soon as we would get one mess cleaned up they would go again. I did manage to get Melba milked, but Bonnie was making so many messes I couldn’t even begin to get her milked. As soon as I let Melba out I had Papa stand behind Bonnie with the poop bucket so that no more messes hit the floor and I was finally able to get the cow milked. I found out how traumatizing the episode was to Papa the next day when he told me that it probably wasn’t a good idea to milk more than two cows at a time and that they needed to be on the same side because he couldn’t catch poo from four cows at one time and he definitely couldn’t catch any from those who were behind his back. It did slow the milking process down, but it cut out a lot of stress for Papa and me. Milking two cows at a time is much more relaxing than hooking up one or two on my side and then running over to Mama’s side (because her back still prevents her from milking) and hooking up one or two cows there and then running back over to my side to finish my two cows and then back over to Mama’s side to finish the two cows over there. By the time we finished milking and Papa got his chores done and helped Steve with washing the milking equipment it was going on 11:00—so I guess you could call our breakfast, brunch it was so late and we had no lunch that day. Once breakfast was over I sat down at the computer to answer around 50 emails from those wanting to place an order. I had been so busy planting carrots on Monday and cooking on Tuesday that I had not been able to answer any emails. So for the next few hours I worked on the orders, Mama worked on the puzzle, and Papa took a nap in the rocking chair. Once I had all the emails answered then I had the terrible job of figuring out who could actually get milk. Thankfully with the holiday not as many people had ordered, so I didn’t have to cut too drastically—just about 25 gallons instead of the 60 gallons the week before. We had a cow give birth last Sunday, but she will not let down her milk and she is having a terrible reaction to the milking claws—so she will have to be a nurse cow instead of a milk cow. We hope to let her raise Merci’s calf and her calf—then we will have all of Merci’s milk. Once the orders were all put together I let Mama make the receipts while Papa and I went out to the Market Garden to harvest the veggies for the orders. Dinner was easy that night because we ate leftovers.
Usually we make deliveries to Jacksonville on Wednesday’s but since that was Christmas Day we postponed the delivery day to Thursday. So our morning was spent milking and packing and then Papa was off. Mom worked on cleaning up the garage—which needs it really bad. Steve and I headed to the Market garden to plant some potatoes. I planted some red potatoes the end of August (they were sprouting from our May harvest). After we had planted around 80 potatoes I sold a bunch more so that others could grow some potatoes—and I still had sprouted potatoes left. I left them in storage and their sprouts just got longer and longer, and after four months I finally decided to go ahead and plant them. I have never planted potatoes in December, but I have a friend that does so I decided to give it a try. I have nothing to lose (besides time and energy if they do not grow), and everything to gain if they grow. We planted two beds with two rows each with a total of 78 potatoes. One bed consisted of potatoes that had short sprouts, and the other bed consisted of potatoes that had foot long or longer sprouts. The last time I planted overgrown sprouted potatoes I had a bumper crop—hopefully they will do just as good.
Friday was our last processing day in 2024. There were 65 chickens and because I had let them go an extra week (meaning we processed them at nine weeks instead of eight) we had some pretty large chickens. The largest was 8.5 pounds. I hope to be able to get some more chicks the middle of January, but we will have an almost three month break from processing while we wait for them to arrive and grow. When the processing was all done Mama and I headed to town to run some errands, and it was late by the time we got home. Christmas Eve dinner leftovers came in grand handy again!
Saturday I got up early and headed over to the milk house to bottle the kefir and set up the milking equipment. I knew that if I didn’t have the kefir bottled early I would never have time to bottle it before Papa had to leave for the Gainesville delivery since milking the cows has been taking me so long. Once the milking was done, the orders were packed, and the customers were taken care of Mama and I worked at cleaning things up and getting odd things done. She worked some more in the garage. I made a million trips up to the sewing/storage room to put away décor boxes and things that were found in the garage that belonged upstairs. I also finally got around to juicing the key limes from our tree and vacuuming my bedroom. There is so much to do here on the farm that it seems that the little things slip through the cracks. If you do not vacuum nothing will rot, weeds will not take over, and things will not die—so it gets pushed aside while we milk cows, plant/weed/harvest the gardens, cook meals, do laundry and a million other things that are much more pressing. I was very grateful to have finally managed to get the vacuuming done. I do not know how many times I have put the chore on my “To Do List” to only have something more pressing take its place. This time I was determined that nothing should prevent me from accomplishing the vacuuming—even if it meant that dinner would be late.
If I was to make a New Year’s resolution it would be to find time to regularly clean, sew and play the piano—but I do not want to give up anything in order to find the time, I just want to manage my time more wisely. May the Lord teach all of us to redeem our time wisely in this New Year!
Until next year . . .
Serving you with Gladness,
Tiare