7125 Old Stage Road Raleigh NC 919-322-0197
Our friend Craig has taken his mixologist genius and turned it into a full fledged business.
Today was the first day he was open. Dustin and I took a few minutes and stopped by to wish him well and to pick up a few products from opening day. The business name is ABV and they are at 517-A West Cabarrus in the warehouse district in Raleigh. If you like booze and cocktails, go see Craig. He is the man and will have you drinking better drinks than you’ve ever had.
This little farm girl is cute, and a few minutes in she snuggles in with the cow and it’s really cute.
It was too good not to share. Thanks to SWMBO for forwarding it to me.
I took the day off today. Instead, today was a farm day, all day. I started about 4:45 cooking breakfast. Bacon we smoked ourselves and an omelette from our eggs with cheese I also smoked. By 6am I was in the shop working on our new pig trailer. This trailer is a hydraulic lowering trailer that will sit down flat on the ground via raisable wheels. We are modifying an old flat-bed trailer that we had left over from the old days. Once the hydraulic axles are made, we’ll make a cage on the flat deck of the trailer with a gate where we can let the pigs in. The idea is we put the trailer in the pig paddock, put some food in the trailer, the pigs walk on to eat, then we close them in. Lower the wheels and then you drive the pigs to wherever they need to go next. It’s the Cadillac of pig moving.
This mornings project was to make pin bosses for the cylinders. I already had some 1.5″ steel round bar so I just cleaned it up on the lathe and drilled out the 1″ interior dimension. I was able to make 6 pieces, just what I needed, before the guys from the well company showed up at 8:30.
The well project is finally coming together after all the earlier work we did. NW Poole is doing the work and they are installing solar panels, inverters, wiring, etc. The batteries and battery table are courtesy of yours truly.
There were some missing parts so the well will be finished tomorrow rather than today as we’d hoped. More pictures to come as it gets closer to completion.
I had to leave the well project to go deliver two of our pigs to the processor in Bailey, NC. This is our first time using this processor, Dean Street Processing. They are new and are much closer than Acre Station where we’ve been taking our pigs (45 mins vs 2 hours drive time.) I had to spend some extra time since this was our first drop off but everything went great. The pigs walked right off the trailer and didn’t cause any fuss. They were rather odd-looking because our pigs looked like Godzilla in Tokyo compared to the commercial pink pigs that everyone else was dropping off. They were more than twice the size.
After settling up with the processor, I hurried back to Garner so I could go with Miguel to return the backhoe we used to bury Benjamin. After grabbing a quick lunch at El Toro, and returning with Miguel, I loaded the freezer truck with 250 pounds of beef and various other goodies and took off for Fayetteville to make a delivery. It took about 45 minutes to sort out all the beef, get an invoice written up, etc, then one hour drive time home to arrive at 5:30. I met with Miguel to review the day and plan for the rest of the week (that sounds much better than “BS for a minute on the day”).
After Miguel left I spent some more time in the shop and then came to the house for dinner. Ninja Cow brisket, leftover from yesterday. Then our friend Dana called to pick up some beef so back to the barn to get her fixed up with a big order and finally to the house at 7 to grab a shower.
It was a long but productive day. The freezers are a bit lighter and our customers are happy. Everything worked, and nobody got hurt. Sounds like a good day to me.
Today we have another list of things you shouldn’t eat. This time they are leaving bacon alone, as they should. Instead they are focusing on things that are contained in the foods that many of us eat every day. The intent seems to be to focus us on things we didn’t realize were in our food and should we find out the truth, we would at least say “yuck!” Personally I don’t eat any of the stuff they are talking about, at least knowingly.
Except for ice cream, I LOVE ice cream. Not quite as much as bacon, but awful close. Having read this article, so lovingly forwarded to me by SWMBO, I started doing a bit of research on Breyers and learned that it isn’t the same ice cream I grew up with. It appears that Breyers is guilty of the same thing that the other ice creams are and that “natural flavorings” is actually castoreum, or at least can be. The article says 1,000 pounds is used annually in the food industry. That’s a very small amount for the entire industry. I also learned that Breyers has been cheapened over time and it contains less cream than what I grew up with. That’s also why ice cream is soft now coming out of the freezer where it used to be hard. It’s part of the new recipe. This is all internet gossip, but stuff I couldn’t find a counterpoint to. It’s possible my Google-fu has weakened but I’m not so sure.
Apparently this means that I now have to find another ice cream that I can purchase which makes me sad. You just can’t trust anything anymore. Does anyone have any suggestions on an readily available ice cream that I can eat with only the normal, I’m going to get fat guilt? I won’t buy Ben and Jerry’s due to their political stance. Blue Bell is out. Haagen-Dazs has never been my go to. There are some really good ice creams at Whole Foods but I’m not driving to Cary for ice cream. I have a milk cow, sugar, an ice cream maker, and a wife. If I could somehow combine those elements, perhaps I could produce ice cream by some sort of magic. Of course, the trickiest ingredient if the wife. It’s quite volatile and tricky to handle.
If you don’t see posts for a few weeks, my experiment went horribly wrong.
What kind of headline is that? Implying there is something wrong with bacon and that gasp! Something could actually be worse than bacon?! I love bacon. Bacon is a physical manifestation of all that is right with the world. No matter what deviltry greet me each day, I know that bacon is going to be there for me each morning and will make me happy. Bacon never lets me down, unless I’m fool enough to run out of bacon which if getting closer every day. I need to process a pig on farm soon so I can smoke some more bacon. Mmmm, home smoked and cured bacon………
What was I talking about. I got lost in bacon. Oh yeah, tilapia. Here is a web post on tilapia and why it’s actually bad for you. It’s from the folks who brought us the book, Eat this, not that. I have one of their books around here somewhere and it was interesting back when I was learning nutrition and still drinking Cokes and eating cereal. Now, it’s not really applicable to my food choices.
Today I finally fixed a problem we’ve had since the inception of our website. You have probably noticed that often times the pictures on our site are stretched oddly making people look fat or tall, depending on the way the picture is stretched. I’ve tried everything I knew to figure out what was going on, to no avail. For a while I was posting the pictures to Instagram thinking maybe that was a better solution however I disliked having to go to another site and link back. Plus all the resolution of the picture was lost as Instagram only uploaded medium quality pictures.
Finally yesterday our IT savant at work, Ray, pointed out our picture problem and noted that it was probably our theme causing the problem. Now this was unwelcome news for a few reasons.
One, I was reluctant to change themes as the one I used was very clean and very customized. I didn’t want to change the look of the site, plus I didn’t want to redo all the customization.
Two, I introduced Ray to WordPress. Talked him into it you might say. And I used our farm website as an example of what he might do if he’d spend some time working on it. A couple of months later he’s built his own site and is now helping me with mine, which means he’s smarter than me. That’s something I already knew, but I can’t say I like having it so painfully obvious.
Thanks to Ray and a bit of not sleeping this evening, we now have a new theme for Ninja Cow Farm.com. There were two main things I wanted to accomplish with this theme change. One, I wanted the pictures to display normally. It appears that they now do. If you scroll through the old links you’ll see what everyone actually looks like. Two, I wanted a sticky menu. That means when you scroll down to read our posts, the menu stays on your screen vs. scrolling off the screen as it was before. I get a lot of emails with questions from people that are answered right there in the menu. I think people are scrolling, reading a bit, then not able to find a menu to take the next step. Hopefully this them will help with that.
If you see anything broken or missing, please let me know. I’ll slowly be customizing this new theme and working on things that might have gone poof with the theme change.
In anticipation of having beef back in stock I’ve finally ordered a square credit card reader and set up an account and all of our cuts of meat. This means that now when you come to pick up beef, or pork in a few weeks, that we can create your order quickly, sum up the total, and finish everything with a quick swipe of the credit card.
This means that having to write checks or wait for me make change is no longer a requirement which should make your buying experience that much better.
We look forward to seeing you.
our LP boiler failed, so it’s wood to the rescue!
A good write-up on her class, this time for women.
I was lucky to attend the class they reference being two years ago. I had no idea who she was but I found out she is indeed a rock star in the meat business. The class was way over my head as am amateur butcher but I really enjoyed it and learned a lot.