Category: News, etc.

Today I made my big round trip to the processor and to some of our farmers to pick up goodies. I grabbed 600 pounds of pork from our processor which included bacon, of course! I also got an entire assortment of sausages, ribs, our famous pork chops, and even some ears for dogs. Plus all the other assorted goodies that come along with a fresh hog. I’ve already sent out emails to the people on our waiting list so if you are looking for some porky goodness and didn’t get an email from me, let me know what you are looking for or better yet book a visit to our farm to buy some meat. We are fully stocked on eggs, milk, jams, honey, vino, etc, etc.

I told you all previously that we had a new author on our blog. I was super excited to see Drew start sharing with you all the great cooking that he has shared with me over the past year. But then Drew posted his first post, chorizo with mussels. Uh oh. I don’t like mussels, not even a little bit.

I mean, I’ve tried them. Multiple times. I’m not the kind of person who turns my nose up at things and won’t try them. I’ve had food poisoning in Africa, I’ve eaten things that were raw and just stopped moving. I like to eat and try new things. I’ve probably had mussels 30 times in my life. Mussels with pasta, mussels with cream sauce, whatever. I just don’t like them. And Drew is super excited about his recipe, and then SWMBO decides that she is going to fact check Drew and make all of his recipes. Now she is excited, he is excited, and I don’t like mussels and don’t know how to tell them without hurting their feelings.

Yesterday I put on a brave smile and go with SWMBO to get mussels from Earp’s Seafood.

By the way, Earp’s is the only place to get seafood as far as I’m concerned. We’ve bought our seafood there since I was knee high to a duck so at least I enjoyed the trip to Earps.

So back to the dinner, I take the kids to Jiu Jitsu and SWMBO stays home and cooks mussels and whatever else Drew had in the recipe. We get home and I’m prepared to eat a small bit and go to bed. I’m not really hungry anyway so no big deal. I’ll try it, because of course I will. Plus the kids need to see me eat it. SWMBO gives me a full plate of scary looking mussels and it also includes bread. Bread that I cannot have on my diet. Apparently it was part of Drew’s recipe so she got it despite the fact I couldn’t have it. This just gets better and better. About 45 seconds later, this is what I had.

I immediately went back for seconds, before SWMBO took anymore. After eating everything that was left over, I went to the cooking pan for this.

I ate the bread, the sauce, all the mussels, all the chorizo, and everything else I could find, lick, or steal. If it was this good, then I’m sure it was a pain in the butt to make. There has to be a downside.

“It was surprisingly easy” was the answer I got from SWMBO. She said she had to go to the store to buy some ingredients that we didn’t normally have on hand but the actual cooking was simple.

Simple, tastes awesome, and no cleanup since I ate everything that wasn’t nailed down. That’s pretty strong for the first recipe out of the box. I can’t wait to try Drew’s next recipe.

 

Saturday we had a surprise in the store. During a small lull in between customers, the girls went into our overflow freezers in the back and found not one, but two packs of ribeyes! I certainly didn’t know they were there and I’d looked through that freezer. Sometimes cuts just get buried under something else and look exactly the same.

When I walked in the store, they were excited to tell me about the steaks and sure enough, they were right. Four beautiful ribeyes hiding in the back of the freezer, ready to be sold to someone.

However the girls had other plans. They started begging like it was a new puppy.

“Please Daddy, I’ve NEVER had a ribeye before! Can’t we have it for dinner?”

Now I know that they’ve had ribeyes before, but it has been quite a while and maybe they don’t remember it. But we had four ribeyes and with SWMBO in the count, that’s five people. Plus I could sell those ribeyes in the blink of an eye. That’s badly needed revenue in the store. Luckily SWMBO happened by and said, “I’ll just eat a different steak, cook your girls a ribeye.” So we grabbed the ribeyes out of the freezer on Sunday morning, which is our normal shopping day for our family. I put them in the fridge and went about my business with Spork all day on Sunday.

Sunday evening, after checking the cows and going to grocery store, I came into the house with all the kids in tow looking to cook some ribeyes for my family. I’d also invited Dustin up so it was going to be a party. When I pulled the ribeyes out of the fridge, they were still a bit frozen in the center. SWMBO correctly said, “Why don’t you wait and do them tomorrow?” Sadly my back was really hurting at the time and I was in a grumpy mood. In those times, I tend to bull ahead and do whatever it is I’m committed to doing rather than demonstrating any patience. I figured I could extend the oven time and get them to come out right.

I had to cook in two batches. The first one cooked with Dustin’s pork chops he’d brought. The pork chops, which were perfectly thawed, came out perfect. The ribeye in the pan with them came out seared but nearly raw in the center. This one went to the Princess who loves raw meat. For the second batch, I extended my oven time because I knew SWMBO wouldn’t eat a red steak. These came out medium well, which is grey and lifeless.

The kids were super excited to eat ribeyes, the steaks they see every customer come in the door looking for. The result? Meh. Not that great. Not because the cow wasn’t raised right, or the flavor was off. But because their farmer chef father is a doofus and didn’t let them come up to room temperature like he tells EVERY SINGLE CUSTOMER to do! Let this be a lesson to you, you can get this best steak in the world but if you don’t treat it right, it’s nothing special. Cooking and prep matter.

Oh well, it will only be MONTHS before we get this chance again. By then maybe they kids will have forgotten I messed up the cooking.

One of the joys of running a business is that you meet so many great people. Sometimes you are so fortunate that your customers become your friends.

About a year ago, I had a tour with a couple. This was back when having a few tours a week was a big deal. They show up and it’s Drew and Cat, and their kids, two of which are babies. Well, all three are babies to me, as in under 2 years old but the last two are twins, like shiny new twins. As in a few weeks old. Cat is nonplussed about the whole thing like it’s just another day. I’m trying to imagine three kids under 2 in my house and failing miserably. I think I had a mild panic attack just sitting there thinking about it. Not these guys, they are rock solid. I guess it doesn’t hurt that Cat is a doctor and Drew is a lawyer. Both are overachievers and used to the work I guess.

We have the tour and then Drew buys some meat for the family. He then starts sending me his friends who buy meat, and then sending me texts of the meals he’s making.

At first he’s asking me how to cook certain things, asking beginner questions, but quickly he’s way beyond my ability and he’s just sending things that look stunning.

He even put a review on our Yelp page complete with his normal awesome pics. I started getting calls from people wanting to know if we were a restaurant because of his pictures on Yelp. They were dismayed when I told them no, you have to cook it yourself unless you can talk Drew into cooking for you.

I started accusing him of sending food porn to me routinely which only encouraged him. You’ll note that I’ve made a page just for him titled exactly that, food porn. After a year of getting these pictures and recipes, I finally approached Drew and asked him if he’d like to be a contributor on our blog. Considering he’d just started with a new firm, his wife still has a doctor’s job and doctor’s hours, and there are still three little kids running around the house, I was totally prepared for him to say no. Instead he jumped at the opportunity and has already written some initial stuff which will be going up this week. You’ll see more coming from Drew in the future as his imagination and his passion takes him through the culinary world, often with our products but not always. I hope you enjoy the journey with him as much as I have this past year.

I’m trying to help out some young boys who are starting their own business. Buck Naked Farm, our great friends and beekeepers have two young boys who are still at home. In order for the boys to make some money and get into this farming business, they’ve decided they want to start raising ducks and selling duck eggs. This is 100% a venture (with oversight of course) of the boys so I’m going to support them all that I can.

We don’t usually get a lot of requests for duck eggs. Probably because people didn’t know we could get them which is my fault. But also maybe people don’t know why duck eggs are so darn good for you.

Or that duck eggs are great for cooking.  You can use them interchangeably with chicken eggs for the most part, and they have all kinds of nutritional goodness beyond what a chicken egg has.

What I’d like to do is to get some people routinely buying duck eggs from us. I have a source for them now from another one of our great farmers. As the boys get their flock built up, I’ll slowly add their eggs as they can start delivering them. This way I can make sure you get your eggs when you want them without interruption and let the boys build their business without overdoing it.

So if you want to start getting duck eggs, just let me know. I can have them as soon as next week for you.

As I spoke about before, the girls are starting their own bakery. They decided that they needed a logo as cool as the current farm logo.

We’d gone to 99designs.com to get the farm logo done and couldn’t have been happier with it. It’s unique, edgy, and fun. It’s certainly better than anything we could come up with on our own. With this logo as our example, we set out to design a new logo. After some pre-work, we submitted 4 logo designs to everyone to get their input. Very quickly one design rose to the top.

This was the only logo that actually matched what I’d requested in my contest write up. I wanted something that looked frilly and girly at first. If you didn’t look twice you’d not even notice anything unusual about it. But our girls aren’t usual, they are farm girls. So if you look closer, you see daggers and the teddy bear has x’d out eyes. It didn’t have as much detail as I’d have liked but it was an early draft. However there was a problem. The girls didn’t want me to run a contest. They’d already picked their favorite.

It was this one.

To top it off, SWMBO really loved this one as well. It’s definitely edgy, it’s also fun like the farm logo. Plus we can cut out the cupcake skull and use the words as a text only logo.

This logo was very polarizing, kind of like Donald Trump. It seemed that everyone either LOVED it or HATED it. Most troubling, some of our closest friends were the ones who hated it. But, some of our closest friends loved it. What to do? Despite the multiple one star votes, it was a close second place to the first logo. What to do?

While I was on 99designs, I went back to look at the last poll we’d run for our farm logo design contest. I remembered we’d picked the 2nd place choice back then but couldn’t recall what first place was.

This logo looks flat and lifeless compared to the one we have now. It was about 25% of the cost to set up to print which had its advantages but the pain of that cost is long gone and my farm t-shirts, license plates, door panels, etc. all look great to me now. At the time, this one was my favorite and SWMBO voted strongly for the one we eventually picked. Now I can’t imagine having this one as our logo. So what to do? As any smart man would, I went with what the girls wanted.

We also got included a text heavy version of the logo for our use. The designer bent over backwards to make sure we were happy with our final product, even calling us multiple times after he’d won just to make sure we had everything. I think after this logo settles in, we’ll wonder why we ever looked at the other ones.

Now, to order some shirts.

This is the before picture. Before this shiny even row of ice cream was decimated by the crowd (and my kids) this weekend.

The ice cream was so new that we didn’t even have spoons in the store to send out with the pints (sorry kids, you’ll have to wait till you get home 🙂

Actually one little girl, who’d just been feeding cows and had been drooled on quite a bit, decided she couldn’t wait and dipped her finger in the ice cream to try a bite. Nobody really thought it through so I asked, “Is that the hand you were just feeding cows with?” I figured she’d be grossed out but she shrugged her shoulders and merrily kept eating her ice cream. Based on the looks on her family’s faces, she claimed that pint as her own. Way to go girl! I was impressed.

So far the comments from customers have been stellar on the ice cream. The girls were a little concerned that having ice cream would hurt cookie sales but we managed to sell all the cookies we had yesterday, except two, and those two got scarfed up by the kids after work so all is well. They even managed to split two cookies three ways without fighting. But I attribute that peaceful outcome more to them being tired than really getting along that well. That’s a parenting tip there folks, make your kids work 10 hour shifts with no breaks and they get along just fine. 🙂

As long as our dairy will keep selling to us, I think the ice cream is here to stay. We even discussed putting some chairs in front of the store so folks can sit and enjoy their ice cream if they want. I know after a long day, I’d like to do exactly that so as soon as I find some furniture I like (and can afford) look for some outdoor seating in time for spring.

I went back to look at how many cookies we’ve sold since the girls started selling them. 101! Not too bad for a couple of girls and their own little business.

Thanks to everyone who has bought cookies from the girls. They keep a straight face when you’re in the store but they are SUPER excited whenever anyone buys a cookie.

This past Sunday Spork and I worked the farm as usual. It was a nice day and things went very smoothly thanks to the guys having most of the food pre-loaded into boxes for us. All the piggies and cows were happy and we even had time to grab a quick bite of lunch, which doesn’t happen very often.

After lunch, we went to our hay farmer to pick up one last load of hay to get us to spring, I hope. Even though our leased farm has some grass we can graze, we want to be sure we have hay to get us through if there is a problem.

On the way back from picking up hay, Spork and I were discussing all kinds of things about what you need to know when you grow up. Balancing a checkbook, troubleshooting and systems analysis, mechanical comprehension, cooking for yourself and for girls, conflict resolution, etc. Partway through Spork gave a yawn, the first sign he’s becoming a teenager already. I asked if he was bored listening to me.

“Yep, a bit.”

Ok then. Looks like just following along behind dad and handing me stuff isn’t enough to keep him occupied. Luckily we had been working on him learning to drive the tractor and feed the pigs lately. When we got back, I informed him, “There is the tractor, there is where the hay goes. Get it off and stacked.”

He looked at me like, “Ok, so show me how and help me.”

I strolled into the shop and started working on something else. 15 minutes later, I went out to find him still working on the first bale. I helped him get over the issue he was having then left him to unload hay. After a few checks to see if I was coming back to help, he proceeded to unload the whole trailer by himself and get everything stacked. No bent metal, no blood, no issues. When he got done (about an hour + later) I had him go out in the cow pasture and handle some hay out there since he was now tractor/hay qualified.

After he got the cows hay straight, I asked him how he felt after doing an adult’s job? He said it took five years off of his life from being stressed.

So much for being bored. I love raising kids on a farm.

I’ve begged our processor until they caved. It’s not always easy to cash in your brownie points. Thankfully mine just got redeemed.

Our processor is going to let us take two cows on Monday the 22nd instead of just the one we had scheduled. Since they are 90 days out on new spots in the schedule, this is a big deal. This means we should have over 1100 pounds of beef back the beginning of March putting us well stocked on beef.  It does mean that our pickup date has been pushed back from the 2nd of March to the 5th of March but we’ll be well stocked for the weekend.

Plus we have two hogs at the processor right now that we’ll be picking up on Wednesday of next week. We should be stuffed to the gills shortly.

Of course, none of this will help anyone this weekend but will help quite a bit over the next month. We do still have a lot of selection of other cuts of meat, plus plenty of chicken and plenty of dairy products so we have a lot for you to choose from. But rest assured the big restock is coming.