Every Sunday, my Grandmother was quite predictable she either made us a Pot Roast or a Beef Stew. My Grandmother was one of my main cooking teachers growing up. Both of my Grandmothers were really, they both believed I had a special talent and would instruct me from behind as I began cooking. This Beef Stew has varied little from the time my Great-Grandmother Rumsey taught my Grandmother Hill.
Beef Stew is an American tradition, every family has its own special recipe and this is mine. Unfortunately few pictures were taken of this dish as it was Halloween and the family descended on the pot before I remembered I didn’t have a final picture. The recipe provided below few 5 adults and 2 children with no leftovers.
The Boneless Beef for Stew price at the NCF store is $8.99 lb. Combined with the veggies you’re running about $15 for a meal that easily fed 7 with no empty stomachs afterward. Boneless beef for stew can take time to become tender. Long cook times are recommended. The processor uses leftover that is not being turned into ground beef to make boneless beef for stew.
*make sure to not pepper until the end of this dish*
Beef Stew
1lb NCF Boneless Beef for Stew
3 TBS EVOO divided 2/1
8 cups beef broth
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1 lb carrots
1 julienned large yellow onion
6 minced cloves of garlic
8 oz sliced baby bellas
2 cups peas
2 chunked ribs of celery
2 medium russet potatoes chunked
1/3 cup flour
10 sprig of thyme or 2 tsp thyme leaves or 1 tsp ground thyme
salt and pepper to taste
Cut Beef into bite sized chunks
Season beef with salt and pepper
Flour beef
In a stock pan or dutch oven on med heat heat 2 tbsp of Evoo
Brown Beef and remaining flour about 5 minutes
Remove beef to bowl add in remaining 1 tbsp of EVOO lower heat to med/low
Add in garlic, onion and mushrooms season with salt cover and cook for 7-10 minutes until onions are translucent
Add in apple cider vinegar
Scrape bottom of pot getting .p all the little crispies
Turn heat up to med. & bring to a simmer
Once simmering add in beef broth & thyme cover and lower heat back to low/med or low cook for 45 minutes
Add in carrots, celery potatoes cook for 20 minutes
I haven’t been posting any gunsmithing stuff lately. For some reason, I have it in my head that customers won’t like seeing these jobs on our farm website. This is despite the fact that multiple customers have told me they enjoy reading these posts. I’m gonna work on getting this mental block out of my head because there is plenty of opportunity on these type of posts. I’ve been averaging about two gunsmithing jobs per week for the past few months which is about perfect for me. Slow enough I can keep it organized but quick enough I always have a job waiting on me when I have a few minutes.
Last week I received a call from a customer asking if I could fix his bent shotgun. Bent is always a scary word because some things can’t be easily straightened but it turns out he’d only bent his ventilated ribs. But to add a twist, he had a hunt scheduled with customers on the 8th and had to have his shotgun back before then. Could I get it done in time? Sure.
“Oh, and can you replace the buttstock on it as well?”
“If I have time, I’ll get it done.”
I wasn’t worried about the buttstock so much. But getting these bends out on time was worrying me because I needed a tool from Brownells first to do it correctly and that would take a week. But first, let’s look at the damage.
The first bend. Not too bad. Certainly recoverable.
Who knows how these things happen. When you are bird hunting, moving from field to field, a shotgun can take a beating getting in and out of the truck. And ventilated ribs are really susceptible to being damaged easily. They are thin between the anchor points and there is no support. These things happen so no fault to the customer.
This one was much worse
This second bend was pretty bad. It was all the way down to the barrel which leaves no room for getting under it to raise it. That’s solvable as you simply lift from the edges and get just a tiny bit of space to work with. You then inch your way towards the middle, resetting slightly closer each time, then raising a tiny bit, then inching closer, till you can finally get purchase in the middle. However, I decided to start with the easy one first.
The tool is basically like a gear puller but it’s made just for shotguns. Once you get it hooked in, it simply cranks and raises the bent piece back to where you want it. Or at least you hope so. In reality, it raises it up, but not machined flat like the rib is from the factory. So you begin a series of raising an area, checking it for flat, then hammering (with a delrin hammer, non-marring) back down the high spots. This of course isn’t precise so maybe you get the area you want, maybe it dips a bit again. Of course the straight section of metal is now wavy so you raise the new low area and wash, rinse, repeat. Fortunately I have a background as a blacksmith so working with metal is like coming home to me.
So to raise the original bent ribs back takes about 10 minutes. To get it flat again takes about an hour. As usual, nothing is as easy as it appears in the brochure.
Once I had the ribs flat, it was time to sand down the areas on the sides of the rib that were flared. The flaring is either from being bent originally or from the puller marring the rib a bit when did it’s work. Some 400 grit emory cloth, a backing stick, and some elbow grease and we had it back smooth enough to blue.
The gun had some missing bluing already from regular field use so while I was bluing, I went ahead and touched up all the areas that were showing wear, including some spots which had surface rust. Once everything was blued, I burnished it with steel wool to blend the finish.
The finished product. Straight and smooth
If I look close enough, I can find the area where the repair was made because of a few marks on the bottom side of the rib where the puller did it’s work. There is no way to avoid that.
This was a fun job and I had it ready to go on the 4th. Plenty of time for the customer to get here and pick up his gun for his hunt on the 8th. I emailed him to let him know it was ready and he called to check later that day.
“What about the butt pad I asked you about?”
“Huh? What butt pad?”
In my rush to get his ribs fixed so he could make his scheduled hunt, I’d completely forgotten about installing a new butt pad for him. Dope! Not to worry, we can do the butt pad on another trip after the rush. The ribs were a no go item, the butt pad was just an upgrade while I had it. A bit of lost revenue but hopefully he’ll bring it back after bird season and I can get it done for him.
Today SWMBO is off with her girlfriends and I’m off to the Sustainable Agriculture Conference in Durham. The kids went to stay with Grandma so Lucy and her hubby Jason have stepped up and are running the farm store in everyone’s absence. Running the store is old hat for Lucy, except she’s going to be out giving tours all day in Spork’s place. Jason can surely run the store, but it’s not easy doing something for the first time. I’ll be a phone call away and Miguel and Vicente are here today so I’m sure everyone will be fine. But stop by and say hello to them anyway, and get some meat for dinner tonight while you are here.
This week I went to our lamb farmer in Oxford and stocked up on fresh lamb, enough that Lucy had to rearrange the freezers Friday to make enough room.
Our ice cream has a new home
Lucy and I have actually been talking about moving the ice cream for a while. Where it was before was a little harder to reach, and it also was in a commercial freezer that goes through more defrost cycles than our residential grade freezer where our chicken resides. As usual, the Lucy did a great job rearranging the store so make things better.
Stocked to the gills with bacon
I also picked up bacon at the pork processor this week (along with other things) and we are more than stocked on awesome uncured bacon currently.
Also our chicken and dairy delivery was made this week so we have ice cream, chocolate milk, whole milk, and even some eggnog! Stop by today and see Lucy and Jason and pick up some goodies for the grill.
I dedicated two cows to standing rib roasts this year. We sell a few for Thanksgiving and quite a few for Christmas so it seemed like a good idea.
So much for planning. We are already sold out except for a few small roasts (4 pounds) that are already in the freezer currently. And I know those will go lightning fast.
I know you’re going to ask me if we have standing rib roasts over the next month and a half. I’m going to look sad and tell you no. When you complain, I’m going to point you to this post.
What people think a cow is made of.
I’m still looking for a breed of cows that breaks down like this! Then I’ll have all the rib roasts you want.
Today we are loading #39 to go to the processor. This is one of our home grown cows, from our blood lines. This boy weighed over 1500 pounds at the last weigh in and is officially the largest cow we’ve ever produced on our farm. He is MORE than finished so I’m excited to see how these cuts come out.
We are still well stocked on beef currently, so swing by in the next few weeks and grab some beef for Thanksgiving. We also are well stocked on pork, lamb, and we are slowly catching up on chicken.
About a week ago, I posted that we had a new cut of pork in the freezer. It was just a little note at the end of a beef update. The cut of pork showed up and looked like this.
New cuts! Boston butt steaks
I wasn’t really sure what it was. Lucy had attended the Women in Meat Conference and she and Brooke (Hi Brooke) from the processor had some sort of pow wow on new cuts Lucy wanted to bring in. I kinda tuned out of the conversation so I really didn’t know what she ordered.
So I’m unloading the truck and these things are in the box. Boston butt steaks. Looks cool, no idea what it is. Stick them in the freezer somewhere and worry about it later.
In talking to Lucy later, she informs me these are cut wrong and aren’t what she asked for. Go figure. I explained that this is what happens when we go out of the norm. Now we have 20 packs of these things that we’ll have to do something with but oh well, it’s ok. When you are a farmer, your mistakes taste like bacon!
Last night, SWMBO finally got around to cooking our first batch of these butt steak thingies. That’s how it is at our house. Something getting old? Something out of date? Something with damaged packaging? The farmer gets the stuff nobody wants, not the ribeyes.
Not knowing what else to do with these weird cuts, she just cooked them the way we do our pork chops, along with some peas from a bag and a bottle of vino (for the sauce and the chef!) She plated the steak thingies about 10 minutes after walking in the door and pushed one in front of me.
“They looked good. Hmm, they cut good, kinda tender like a porter house or a ribeye. They seem to have great marbling… if I didn’t know better, I’d think this was a steak….”
So I took a bite, and another. Good Lord these things are awesome! I didn’t really taste the pork flavor, they tasted more like a steak than a pork product. They were tender, juicy, flavorful. SWMBO said she tasted the pork and she’s probably right but I don’t care. They were awesome!
I ate mine. Then I gnawed the bone. Then the kids wandered off to play. I ate theirs. Then I was eyeing the one that was for lunch later but I decided to behave.
So we’ve got like 12 packs of these things I think. I’ll have to look when I steal them all and hide them from everyone so they don’t get sold. I think this is my new favorite thing! The only problem is, I’m not in the store today so hopefully nobody will know about our secret new cut till I get back home and can hide them from customers.
Received a text from our leased farm owner yesterday. We had a cow dead by the pond where we load and unload the cows. Vicente went to bury the cow. It was #69 who died of unknown causes. He was born in June of 2016 to #1.
Fortunately Lucy has done a good job of telling people when they are in the store so we still have a good number of pre-orders but now is the time if you want to get on the list to let us know. The window will be closing before too long so if you want a turkey, you need to get by and put a deposit on one.
The turkeys are $6.25 per pound and will range between 15 and 20 pounds. Deposits are $40.
We recycle more than we actually farm around here. If you’ve been on a tour, you’ve heard me drone on about what we do, 7 million pounds of produce diverted from the landfill, two truck loads of pallets per month, 16,000 pounds of cardboard per month. Blah, blah, blah.
These numbers are estimates and averages. We know a box of food for the pigs weighs about 1000 pounds when full. We “know” because I know when the tractor starts tipping from being overloaded. Is it really 1000 pounds? I don’t know. Maybe it’s 900, maybe it’s 1100. Heck maybe it’s 1400 pounds. It’s not like I’ve actually weighed the thing. There is only one item that we weigh regularly and that is the cardboard.
Once per month, I take our big trailer and load 10 bales of cardboard, which should weigh about 16,000 based on the first few times we took cardboard to the recycler. That’s where the 16k per month number comes from. I take the truck and trailer over to the recycler off Poole Road and drive the entire rig across the scales where I’m weighed before and after unloading. After I get done, I receive a weigh ticket, that looks like this.
The latest receipt from recycling
First you see our gross weight as we go across the scales inbound. That’s 40,460 pounds! Yikes that is heavy. This is why I insist on excellent brakes on our equipment. Then we see our Tare weight or empty weight of 18,400. The difference in these two weights is what the 10 bales of cardboard weigh. That weight for this load is 22,060 pounds! So much for 16,000 pounds per month. In fact, the last three tickets have averaged 19,773 pounds! That means that we are recycling, at this run rate, almost a quarter million pounds of cardboard annually! All of this cardboard previously went into the landfill along with the produce so this is true change for the environment.
This 250,000 annual pounds of cardboard is in addition to the 7 million pounds of produce we are recycling annually. And the 6 truck loads of plastic totes annually. And the 1000 yards of chips that we receive from tree companies annually for using in the pig paddocks. The chips were going to the landfill as well. And the various wood totes, boxes, etc. We don’t even count them.
I guess this might explain why I’m speaking at the FoodCon 2016 Food Waste panel at NC State in November. Looking at everyone else on the schedule, I don’t think I’m qualified. But looking at what we are doing, it looks like I might fit in. We’ll see. Hanging around academics and government types isn’t my usual day. I will have to remember to behave. And wear non-farmer clothes.
No not Crystal, Miguel’s other baby. Our John Deere 5320 tractor that we use every day on the farm. The clutch was out of adjustment and simply didn’t have any more to give. I loaded the old girl up and took it to the shop to have someone with heavier equipment than us work on it.
In talking to David at the shop, he said we were there in the nick of time. We’d run 99.9% of the clutch out of this thing. Any more wear, and we’d need to machine the fly wheel.
Split in half
Step one was to remove the loader. Then they did the old magician’s trick of sawing the lady in half.
The back half of our tractor, with the clutch housing exposed.
When I got there Monday to check on progress, they were already putting the clutch back in which was a good sign. But then they pointed out a leaking wheel bearing, and some rust that had to be repaired. Those were bad signs. Also our loader valve needed to be overhauled and they weren’t aware of it (why I’d stopped to make sure.) So it looks like our little lady will be in the hospital at least all of this week. Hopefully I can pick her up soon since we use this thing every day.
The front half of our tractor
I think I’ll swing back by today and see if they have it back in one piece yet. Nothing like a customer who stops by constantly to check on progress to keep progress moving along.
