News, etc. Archives - Page 65 of 73

January 8, 2014January 6, 2014

Making cheese

So it was time to use up some milk. I’d already made plenty of yogurt so it was time for cheese. Mozzarella to be specific. I started by sterilizing everything and getting 4 gallons of milk ready. I also had the capable help of The Princess and Bok Bok.

I heated the milk to 90 degrees then added my renet solution. 5 minutes of sitting undisturbed (actually 15, oops) and I had a clean break. After cutting and draining I had this.

Into the microwave for heating and stretching which gets the whey out of the cheese. It took about 4 rounds in the microwave till I had this.
It’s like working taffy except its a bigger mess and less sticky.

Now for the salt. No measurement. It’s to taste, which is an excuse to eat some cheese. Warm and just salted its the best it will ever be. Like grandmas cookies hot from the oven vs stale Oreos. If you ever thought about making cheese. This is the reason to do it.

Here we are incorporating the salt, mixing it into the still warm cheese.

The final product, with a cup of whey in each bag. Stretched into long string cheese lengths and vacuum sealed.

January 7, 2014January 7, 2014

Dietary fat and getting fat

I was looking up a reference for a different post and stumbled across the following link on PBS. It’s some learned people debating fat, low fat, and the American diet. I thought there was some good reading on this page so I thought I’d share it here with everyone.

Here is the link to the page.

January 6, 2014

Arctic weather

The arctic weather that is hitting everyone is making it’s way here today. It was 61 degrees this morning and windy. I wore pants and a shirt to milk and was a little warm. By 10am it’s supposed to be 40 and by tonight it’s 12 to 8 degrees depending on who’s forecast you watch. 8 degrees is Wisconsin cold. It’s cold that I don’t like to see. It’s hard on the animals and hard on the facilities. We’ve managed to not have any issues with the cow waterer this winter, even with the freezes. The water hose freezes at night, but then thaws during the day and the cows get all their water like normal. However tonight it’s going to freeze hard, then not get above freezing all day tomorrow so there is no opportunity for the cows to get their water. It looks like we’ll be unhooking the water hose and draining it, then hooking it up to fill the trough, then unhooking and draining again. A lot of labor for water. This is all if we can even drain it properly. If not, it’ll be buckets of water to fill the water trough, meaning even more labor. Fortunately trough itself doesn’t freeze so we can water throughout the day.

Speaking of freezing, the pig waterer froze Saturday and broke in two places. We’ve switched to an alternate waterer. Pigs don’t drink much water anyway, especially since they have two pallets of watermelons to eat. That should keep them well hydrated through this cold spell.

Looks like it’ll be a day and night of stoking the boiler to keep the heat going. 8 degrees is a new low for the boiler so this should be a good test. I know the boiler will keep up. The question is will the wood and the stoker.

January 5, 2014

School project

The Princess, finishing up her school project. This is the base for the hanging garden of Babylon. After the paint dries, its time for the greenery and then the report writing starts. In case you think she didn’t do her own work…

January 4, 2014January 27, 2014

Breaking in a new knife, and a new man

Thanks to the generosity of one of my employees, we were able to get two deer this year, field dressed and delivered to the cooler. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Also for Christmas Spork received a knife that I had made for him. He has been awful proud of wearing a knife and has been itching to have something to cut. Its a big moment in a boys life when he is responsible enough to have a real knife and Spork is justifiably proud. With two deer on the hook, he had just the opportunity to try out the new blade. There was much discussion between he and I as we worked on skinning the first deer. You see at 9 he has never skinned a deer, or even been close to one. A cow, yes. He’s even skinned a pig, but never a deer. So we spent some quality father son time over the deer and he worked his side like a champ. He was truly a joy to work with, and I told him so. He even managed not to throw up, which was in question there off and on. Overall I was tickled we were able to share this experience and look forward to doing it again when its time to butcher the deer next weekend. It will be good to have some deer sausage because SWMBO informs me that we are running low on ground pork. These hams aren’t going to be done soon enough!

January 1, 2014

Working with the Princess

Today I am working for The Princess on a school project. We are building the hanging gardens of Babylon, one of the ancient wonders of the world. We are doing it to scale so no big framing work today however we had to make an ancient water lift system to pump the water to the plants.

While this is a collaborative effort, The Princess handles all the critical jobs and design efforts. She is also in charge of all the math. I provide dumb labor and hit things with hammers.

The Princess is in charge of MIG welding while I have to handle TIG. At 7 she is not quite ready for TIG yet.

After a few hours of work, we did have to take a break to feed the pigs. Tomatoes, baby carrots, and bananas. Not a bad breakfast if you are a pig.

We will work the rest of the day on the gardens, then tonight we will be processing 4 deer that are showing up. A gift from a friend at the end of deer season. Looks like the room we made in the freezer lately from pork is getting replaced by venison. Spork and The Princess will of course be in the thick of any meat processing, as always.

January 1, 2014December 31, 2013

Site stats for the first year

So apparently there is an end of year report on WordPress for how your blog is doing. Being a masochist, or is that sadist, I can never remember which it is I figured I’d go through and see what’s going on. If you are interested, you can see the report here.

Who is bacon.org? I need to know something with that cool of a website.

Of course, as a fan of despair.com I was immediately reminded of the demotivational poster pictured above while reading the report. However, I intended to post a post every day, 7 days a week for the time I was blogging. Some days I don’t get one in but some days I post two so with 160 posts in part of 2013 overall I met my goal. I also have the best journal of farming I’ve ever kept, which isn’t saying much since I rarely keep records.

Overall it’s been a good 2013 and I hope to continue the blog into 2014. In the meantime, I do hope it helps some of you if for nothing else than amusement.

December 31, 2013

Ham update

Today we resalted the hams and put them back in the cooler for their time till its smoking time. We continue to pour off lots of liquid and the hams are looking like they are on their way.

The inmates did a good job and got everything salted and rotated. Unfortunately inmate Brian has some sort of crud like I do. My Ebola has progressed into pneumonia so I still am not getting too much done, which is very frustrating. I keep saying that maybe tomorrow I will feel better. Tomorrow will come, right?

December 27, 2013

And to think

A few months ago I was worried what we were going to do for pig food for the winter. I don’t feed corn to my pigs unless it’s still in the husk(I.e. Fresh). They only get fresh vegetables and table scraps. The problem was that with winter coming the fresh veggies were drying up.

Enter the Mexican farmers market. They bring fresh veggies from Florida weekly and sell year around. We have gone from famine to feast with our food supply but today jumped to a whole other level. Here is what we picked up, just today from one vendor.

I had to shoot it in panorama just to get it to fit in the screen. That’s a trailer full and a DUMP TRUCK full of food, well above the sideboards for both. In 24 hours we picked up about 11 pallets of food. At about 1000 pounds per pallet that’s an amazing amount of food for the cost of gas. Of course our pigs cannot begin to keep up so the cows are getting all they can eat as well and they are loving it. What they don’t eat the trample into the ground and the ground loves it as well. We are feeding on our worst pasture so hopefully next year we will see some marked improvement.

In case you are wondering, we handle the food on both ends with forklifts so the labor isn’t that bad although it will take at least an hour just to burn all the cardboard boxes tomorrow.

December 25, 2013January 3, 2014

More on corn subsidies

I try not to be political on this site, at least as far as taking sides in the R vs D perennial debate. As far as I’m concerned, one is bad, and the other is worse. However spending tax dollars to artificially change the market for food has an effect on us all so I’m putting a bit more out there. We’ll return to your regularly scheduled fuzzy animal pics shortly.

In the post I put out a few days ago about cheap food and subsidies I stated that other real reporters would and do perform the work to back up some of my assertions with fact and statistics. My darling SWMBO was kind enough to send me another article with just what I was referencing. You can read about the details here. This is part of the alternative media so the slant is a little different than CBS. As with any news source, fact check what you read.