Every once in a while we’ll have someone come out to the farm and bring their kids and the following happens.
The kids are excited and running about, the moms are chatting, when suddenly the mom will whirl on me and ask, “There aren’t any (ticks, snakes, dangerous critters, etc) are there?!”
“Um, yeah. It’s a farm. We have all those things. Outdoors is where critters live.”
However this year, I’d not seen something I usually see a few times a year which is a copperhead snake dead on our road. I really hadn’t even thought about it until I passed the guy pictured above after our CFSA farm tour weekend. I guess all the traffic was just too much for him and he didn’t make it across the road, which didn’t hurt my feelings any. I don’t actively search out snakes, but I don’t lament their passing either. Especially poisonous guys like this one. Score one for our customers.
Last week we had a class from NC State come and visit for a field trip. These were students from a niche marketing class who wanted to find out how a farm like ours went to market, and made it profitable. I had no problem sharing the first part. The second part, I couldn’t really help them.
They were about 30 people, which is over our normal limit of 20 on a tour but since everyone was an adult it made things easier. They were a good group of kids and after spending some time on the farm they did finally open up and ask some questions.
This is just one of the school groups we hosted last week. However, this one made the cut because of the cool bus they arrived in. I’m sorry the kids weren’t here to see it. They would have wanted to go for a ride.
Our pork processor let me know a few weeks ago that they were working on a new sausage formula, maple breakfast sausage. They asked if I was interested. Does a cat have a climbing gear?! Of course I was interested!
Ninja Cow Farm is the first farm to have the new maple sausages and of course I had to try them immediately. As in, I left the processor and drove down to the little country diner 2 minutes away. I walked in the door and handed them a pack of Ninja Cow Farm sausages. “Cook these please, with some eggs.”
The wait staff was all laughing, saying they’d never heard of someone bringing in their own meat before but sure, why not. I kept a straight face acting like it was totally normal. The plate above was the result.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t a fan of the way they cooked the sausages (fried in the deep fryer) so the flavor was hidden by the cooking method but I could tell it was there and would be better served if it was cooked properly, on the griddle. That’s ok though, we have 75 pounds of these little guys tucked in the freezer and it’ll be breakfast time at the NCF farm house shortly. In the meantime, we’re open from 2-6 today, and 8-5 tomorrow, so stop by and get some goodies for breakfast. We are still hugely stocked on beef, overflowing on pork, and we have eggs and dairy stuffed to the gills again.
The only thing we are short on is chicken as we keep outrunning our poor chicken farmer. But they will hopefully catch up next week. In the meantime, better get the chicken you need for the week. It’ll go fast this weekend.
To look at our public page you’d think that I haven’t been doing much. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing too much on our website, none of which is fun.
It all started when I received a notice that our website was down. It was down a couple of minutes during the middle of the night so bad, but not the end of the world. Then I received a notice that the site was down for almost an hour. That’s extremely unacceptable. Like sirens going off in my head unacceptable. So first thing that morning I hopped onto our admin site and found…..that…….the…….site……….was………sloooooow.
I’d had an issue with this before, and our hosting provider ended up having had an issue with the server we were on. Surprise, spending more money had solved it so I planned on calling, yelling at them, and getting them to fix it on their dime this time.
The nice support guy answered immediately (Why I love GoDaddy) and jumped right in. Server issue? Nope. Configuration issue? Nope. Hey wait, what’s this? You have 91 gigabytes on your website storage?! That’s insane for a small site.
Hmm, I do upload a lot of pictures. Maybe I’ve gone crazy and didn’t know it?
Hey, what is Updraft plus? That folder is HUGE!
That’s my backup program.
Turned out the backup program had gone crazy and had backed up, to itself, 81 gigs of backup files. Instead of offloading them to our storage site, it was trashing the web server instead and our hard drive space was nearly full. I’ve been fixing this issue ever since. So apologies for the lack of postings. I’m in full on nerd mode, working through the intricacies of web hosting, API calls, and whatnot. We’ll return to your regularly scheduled farm goodness shortly.
Btw, stop by Friday between 2-6. We have LOTS of goodies in the store. Including some new stuff you haven’t seen.
It’s now Wednesday and we are finally getting over the farm tour from last weekend. Not because it was any problem, but because I still don’t have everything put away (Sorry Lucy! I’ll get your chairs and tables back as soon as it stops raining!)
At the end of the weekend, we’d hosted over 200 people through our farm. Nearly everyone received a personal tour from SWMBO or Spork.
Overall it seems that the reaction to our farm was positive and people seemed to enjoy themselves. We didn’t have any kind of formal feedback mechanism so all I can judge by is the comments from people I talked to personally, which I tried to do as much as possible.
We had a bit of a crisis Sunday afternoon as Jennifer from Buck Naked got hung up at her farm and was running late. And our guys we hired to park cars also showed late. Of course all the customers were right on time quickly filling up the parking spaces. Couple that with the fact we were all moving a bit slow that day due to the previous nights festivities and there were a few minutes of excitement. Luckily everyone was so good at what they did that I was pretty much free to step in and handle it till everyone was in place.
On Saturday Miguel had brought one of the baby pigs out for everyone to hold and pet.
Gran SWMBO with her baby pig
On Sunday Gran-SWMBO came out to fill in for him and hold the piglet. Grandma is the master at holding baby piglets so she was the perfect person for the job. Unfortunately our baby piglet was not too pleased and peed all over her. I felt bad for her but she shrugged it off and made sure everyone was happy. There is nothing better than having a grandma around.
Abe Froman was on hand again cooking all day. I don’t know how many packs of sausage he went through, but everyone got all the samples they wanted, the help was able to scarf everything they wanted at the end, and we still had sausage left over so he did an awesome job.
I think our best seller of the weekend was ice cream, but we did sell a bit of meat. The real question is how many people will come back and shop now that they know we are here. We’ll see over the next few weeks but overall we had a bit time on the tour and we are looking forward to next year.
Our first day, of our first CFSA Eastern Triangle farm tour went off pretty much perfectly. We are prepping for day 2 today, which starts at 1pm. More info on today’s plans at the bottom of this post.
We had a steady flow of people from about 12:30 when staff started showing till 5:30 when random people were driving up asking what was going on. In total, we had 124 people come through the gate, not counting our regular customers who came just to shop. We also had Roland and Marianna, both celebrities from CFSA who came to check us out and see how the newbies were doing. It was good to see the brass out checking on the tour.
I actually sold some passes to the tour Saturday morning, not knowing exactly how to do it. “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission” being my mantra. My other one is, “Get the money, then figure it out.” We ended up $5 short at the end of the day in the money count so I guess it was close enough for the girls we date. Better than telling two people no and not getting anything!
We had a full force showing of folks on the farm. Lucy (the chef) and Jason (Abe Froman, nobody has guessed where that comes from yet) were here, along with Erin (our milk maid), SWMBO, Gran SWMBO, Spork, The Princess, Wildflower, and Rutabega (Lucy’s daughter).
Jennifer from Buck Naked farm explaining about bees
Jennifer from Buck Naked Farm was here and she was swamped all day with people talking about bees, honey, etc. I don’t think she ever sat down.
Jennifer did a great job with the kids
We also had Steven parking cars and even Miguel and Vicente came over and spent some time. Miguel was the surprise hit of the day as he went and grabbed one of the new piglets away from the 650 pound angry momma and brought him over to hang out.
Holding the piglet was a highlight of the day
Erin’s milking display stand
We had good weather and good shade, for everyone except Erin. That poor girl had to go chase down the milk cows multiple times and work in the sun. Whenever she could she hid in the shade.
Abe working on his sausages, while Erin cools it in the shade for a few minutes
I found out that the tour is $35 dollars for all the farms, but only $10 for the farm you are standing at. Our normal tour cost is $20 so if you haven’t been in a while, or maybe not at all, today is the day for you. You can take a tour for 1/2 price and see the extras we have out for this special event. The weather is gorgeous today, sunny and warm. We still have ice cream left, as well as chocolate milk. And of course plenty of meat. Stop by and see us between 1 and 5 today. You can pay your $10 when you get here so no planning needed.
While we are open for regular customers today from 8am – 5pm, however starting at 1pm we will also be part of the 10th annual CFSA farm tour.
The official flyer for the farm tour this year
This is our first year being on the farm tour so we have little idea of what to expect but we have all hands on deck should we be so fortunate as to have a large crowd.
We’re legit!
Today SWMBO and Spork will be giving tours on the quarter hour showing new visitors the farm, seeing the baby pigs and chickens. The usual stuff.
Erin, our resident milk maid, will be out by our girls Betsy and Hedi to explain to people how we go about milking our cows, what we do with the milk, etc.
Jennifer Howard from Buck Naked Farm will be here with not only her encyclopedic knowledge of bees, but an observation hive as well so you can see the bees hard at work up close and personal.
Jason “Abe Froman” (extra points if you know what that name is from) will be manning the grill, cooking up samples of our bratwurst and chorizo sausages, whetting your appetite before you head into the store where you’ll find Lucy, Dagny, and Myla helping everyone with their shopping.
Of course the bakery is already hot this morning, making up batches of fresh chocolate chip cookies for today. Make sure to grab yours when you come in.
You can purchase your ticket for the farm tour at the first farm you visit (which should be us, of course!) The tickets are $30 per car so it’s one price for all farms, and all your friends who can ride along. You can see as many of the 25 farms over the weekend as you can get to. I could usually get about 3-4 per day if I tried hard but I usually ended up staying at a favorite farm too long and only hit 2-3. You can buy your tickets from CFSA as well, right here.
We are busy getting ready for the CFSA farm tour this weekend, but Lucy will be manning the store today as normal from 2-6 pm. The good news for you is that we are stocking up in anticipation of the farm tour so sneak in here early and get your goodies before the masses wipe us out this weekend.
Everything at the beach wasn’t boring old dinner though. We also had snacks and goodies.
Goat cheese assortment for snacking
We’d tried all the goat cheeses here and there over time, but with some down time at the beach, we decided to try all the cheeses together and compare one against the other. The surprise of the day was that jalapeno was SWMBO’s favorite. She thinks black pepper is spicy and hot so liking jalapeno cheese was out of character. However she thought the cheese really dampened the spice and you could instead taste the jalapeno itself. Whatever the pros and cons, all the cheeses were scarfed up before you could blink.
I’d mentioned before that we just picked and juiced our muscadine grapes growing here on our farm. Of course a gallon of grape juice made it to the beach.
Muscadine grape juiceTwo types of grape juice, kids juice and mommy juice
Don’t let the ice fool you, that’s Adam’s Vineyard wine in the wine glass. SWMBO strangely likes ice in her wine. She cooks for me so I don’t point out that it is weird.
A new treat, still in the test phase
We also took the opportunity to test out a new product not on the shelf yet. I met a small farmer who had a dried herb product where the herbs were already packaged and ready to be used. You just mixed in sour cream or whatever. We had skyrr tikk (goat’s milk sour cream) from Celebrity Goat Dairy, our goat farmer. Skyrr is basically sour cream and it’s really good. Mix in some herbs and it’s awesome. We scarfed up the dip for a snack, then had some left over for breakfast omelettes.
Goats milk fudge
Speaking of our goat farmer, we also had some of his AWESOME goat fudge. I know what you’re thinking. Goat…Fudge? Huh? Oh good Lord you need to try some! It’s the best fudge I’ve ever had. If you don’t believe me, then trust the kids.
Seconds before it was all gone.Sunrise at the beach
It was a great trip to the beach. Thanks to Miguel and Vicente for keeping everything shipshape on the farm while we were gone. While we may have vacated, we were also doing research on our products and doing more than talking the talk. We were definitely walking the walk of farm fresh suppliers of your families meals.
Ever been to a restaurant and see staff eating takeout from somewhere else?
Or go to a wine store where the owner doesn’t drink?
It reminds me of this old saying.
People who don’t use their own product are telling you something about themselves, or about their product. At Ninja Cow Farm, we have the opposite problem.
You see, last week we had a trip to the beach planned. I know what you’re thinking, “Didn’t they just get back from the mountains?” Yes, yes we did. However for years I’ve not been able to go with the family when they went to the beach and this year I was determined to make it. Had I known how much of a dent SWMBO was going to put in our store’s inventory, maybe I would have stayed home and worked!
SWMBO’s shopping just before our trip.
In preparation for leaving, SWMBO popped into the store and went shopping. We were only gone a few days but we cooked every meal so we needed enough goodies to get us by. Two baskets worth should cover us. The only discussion I was part of was what proteins did we want to take? Lamb? Chicken? We never get the prime cuts like steaks because they are always grabbed by customers but what did we want to take? Is there something that’s getting old in the freezer (nope), is there something we have too much of? (Yep) In the end we decided pork chops, chicken breasts, and boneless stew beef.
Our first dinner was a quick one.
Pork chops of the Gods
Pork chops thaw pretty fast on the counter and I was happy to open some wine and cook when we arrived in late afternoon. However this being the beach, I couldn’t find anything in the cabinets and I’d forgotten to bring my cast iron pan. The chops cooked slowly because of the poor pan quality and electric stove. They also seared poorly because the pan was warped and didn’t get hot enough. The end result is they were fairly tough and the flavor was lost in the overcooking. I’ve said before, cooking matters, and boy does it. But it is always eye opening to see what a difference it makes between good cooking and bad cooking. These exact same chops, cooked properly, are stunning. Overcooked, they are meh. But we were tired and now full so it all worked out.
Breakfast each day was eggs, yogurt, omelets, etc. Our milk from our milk cows, our own eggs, our bacon, our sausage. You get the idea.
The next dinner was my wife’s favorite, chicken marsala. It’s one of the first things I ever cooked for her and she claims it’s why she married me. She loves it when I cook chicken marsala, claiming hers is never like mine (it isn’t).
Chicken marsala, mushrooms, and peas.
However what you see here is not my chicken marsala. You see I sat on the beach, in the sun, and fell asleep, for about 5 minutes. “Get up, we’re going to the pool.” Groggy, I went to the pool and sat down in a different chair. I dozed back off for about 5 minutes when SWMBO decided we needed some together time and started chatting. I woke back up, groggier still. Then shortly it was time to go up to the room. I went in and fell asleep in the bed, this time sleeping about 30 minutes before I was awoken with the request to come out and make dinner. Folks, I was done. Starting and stopping my sleep like that had hit the master reset and I couldn’t form a sentence, much less cook. SWMBO, sadly, had to cook her own meal and I barely drug out of bed to eat then went back to bed. Sorry Sweetie!
The last meal was a special one because it was one of Lucy’s recently posted recipes. This one was beef stroganoff. SWMBO always likes to fact and quality check the recipes on our site from both Lucy and Drew. One, it’s a quality assurance thing. We don’t want to give you bad recipes, or not notice an ingredient is missing. Two, if the recipe is off, we can give the writer a hard time so we get to have that fun. And three, the ingredients are all ours, so the shopping is easy.
Beef stroganoff over noodles
After these three meals, we asked the kids what they liked the best. The votes were overwhelming for the stroganoff however there was some discussion over whose is better, mom’s old stroganoff recipe or Lucy’s new one. Looks like we’ll be having a cook off at the Moore house shortly. I love cook offs!
