Breakfast Burritos, Or Yes, Another Food Post

If time allows, Adrian and I take a weekend afternoon and make a batch of burritos together.  If nature allows these are made with backyard eggs, but that isn't working either, is it? Purchasing Free-Range Organic Eggs obviously added to the overall cost of these breakfast portions, which I would still say cost less that whatever you're buying at McDonalds or Starbucks. They also taste much better in my opinion.

We did our bulk shopping and had a busy weekend schedule, so I volunteered to take one for the team and prep 30 Breakfast Burritos myself today.  It wasn't all bad - Adrian did the dishes when he got home! 

Always with the 'making a mess anyway' mentality, I additionally cooked up 2 packages of bacon for the freezer (to be added to chard and kale stir fries, perogies, baked beans, pea soup etc. over the winter months), and processed a batch of blender salsa to make use of the last of my succession of cilantro plantings, and a few of the more delicate-flavoured red shallots, now that our red onions are all gone.  Because I was on my own, I took the shortcuts of buying frozen hashbrowns instead of dicing my own potatoes, and I bought cheddar slices (not processed cheese) instead of shredding a block of aged cheddar, which we prefer - there's more flavour with less cheese.

 

These food prep and preservation days make me love this table even more.  30 pieces of aluminum foil.....

 

About 20 of our home-grown Alisa Craig onions....

Whole grain tortillas and the frozen hashbrowns with the least number of ingredients listed (why are there so many ingredients in frozen diced potatoes?)

 

A slice of cheese, a portion of black forest ham....

 

Carmelized onions, browned potatoes, and 36 eggs worth of scramble later....

 

And we have breakfast, from the freezer to the toaster, cooked through in 40 minutes - ideally timed for mornings when we manage to get out of bed for a 6 am workout.

 

After planting out multiplier onions and shallots to the garlic beds this weekend, and all this cooking, these are all the onions we have left from our harvest.

Dutch Apple Bread (or Muffins)

The last of our crop of apples was languishing on the table, and I had a tea party to attend, so I diced them up and used one of my go-to recipes for apple bread.  It's called Dutch Apple Bread, after a recipe I found online years ago, on a now defunct website.  I'm not sure why a recipe that calls for orange juice would be 'Dutch,' but I've retained the name out of habit.  (I have substituted milk or buttermilk on occasion when I have no OJ in the house.)

 

Why yes, those are store-bought eggs on the counter, why do you ask?  The girls are coming up on three months without laying now - we've had a talk.

I doubled the recipe twice, since I had the apples, all the ingredients out, and the bowls were already dirty (quadrupling the ingredients would have overwhelmed my mixing arm).  This time, I made three loaves of bread, and a dozen nicely-sized muffins which I find easier to grab out of the freezer for breakfast.  The recipe below will make one loaf or one dozen muffins.

 

 

Country Bulk's Dutch Apple Bread

 

2 cups all purpose flour (or 1/2 and 1/2 all purpose / whole wheat - white whole wheat works nicely)

1 cup granulated sugar

1 cup chopped apples (I leave the peel on and call it 'rustic')

2 eggs

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup orange juice

1/3 cup chopped nuts (pecans here, but walnuts work nicely as well)

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

 

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Cream together the butter and sugar (I had my butter out on the counter overnight, and the house stayed so cold that I popped it into the microwave for 30 seconds to help soften it for ease of use.)  Add the eggs and the vanilla to the creamed ingredients, and beat well.  Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl, and add alternately with the juice.  The mix may seem a bit dry, but the apples will make a difference.  Fold in the apples and the nuts. 

 

Bake in a greased 9x5 loaf pan (oiled) for 50-65 minutes, until the loaf tests done.  The moisture content of the apples you choose can alter the baking time, so be prepared to wait the full 65 minutes. 

 

For the muffins, I tested and was able to remove them from the same 350 degree oven at 28 minutes, though that timing will vary as well.

 

And it was delicious! 

 

Not Your Average Tuna Casserole

This past week I made another set of casseroles for the freezer (and for the day's dinner).  While I call it a Tuna Casserole, it really only contains a nominal amount of tuna (a fifth of a can per portion).  The remainder of the casserole is a selection of vegetables, herbs, a bit of cheese, sauce and pasta.  I had a quick peek online, and actually saw a recipe which involved a box of Kraft Dinner, a can of tuna, a can of Cream of Mushroom Soup, and a bag of chips!

 

Much of the food we make here traces back to a start with a mirepoix of celery, onion and carrot, though often, as here, chard ribs, parsley, and celery leaf herb stands in for the celery (they grow wonderfully well here in the garden, even overwintering and allowing for a small, continual harvest as well as a real spring harvest - celery and celery root are a bit of a trial and go mushy once the weather gets chilly).

 

Add in some tuna, diced tomato, corn, peas, mushrooms, al dente pasta, and Alfredo sauce (or some type of cream sauce - traditionally a cream soup).  We bough the Alfredo sauce almost a year ago when it was on special -impulse buy!-  expecting to use it for a quick pasta dinner, and there it sat.  It worked just fine as a stand-it.

I mixed spices, parmesan, shredded cheddar, and buttered breadcrumbs together, and added them to the casserole to help bind things together and add flavour.

 

I topped the casseroles with a bit more of the breadcrumb mixture, and there you go, 32 portions of vegetable/tuna casserole!

Moving Day

 

We spent some time over the weekend setting up more large cages, so that we could move mothers and their 5-week-old kits outside into the sunshine and fresh air.  The Florida White mothers will eventually go back inside through the colder months, but these cross-bred kits should have warmer coats, and the females we are keeping will spend the winter with a sister for warmth and companionship. We'll keep an eye on things, and offer straw and windbreaks if it becomes severely cold. The nights are cold now, but not freezing, and all of the bunnies are quite dry and warm when we feed them in the dark at 7 am.  All of the 10-week-old bunnies were weighed and sexed - though we'll be checking again to verify our findings.

 

 

Everyone settled right in and noshed on some apple branches as an afternoon snack.

Containment



Twice this past weekend, I looked out the window to see chickens digging in the garden, past the gates and wire and trellising...out in the no chicken zone.  Granted, our lean-to wire panels are nothing that a toddler couldn't move out of the way, and one of them now has a big hole (presumably from a startled racoon or similar backyard visitor), that has been handily - if not prettily - covered by a piece of plywood.  Hey, we're on a budget here.

 

 

The guilty girls.  The first time, Adrian went out and shooed them back to their part of the yard, but when I saw them in the back a second time, I realized they had to be hopping over the fence to get into the no bird zone.  The garden beds back there hold some of my winter greens, which the chickens could dig up in a very short time, as well as winter rye I've planted for the rabbits. 

 

This summer, the goal was to keep them from denuding the blueberry bushes and annoying the neighbour's dog (who barks every time she sees us in our kitchen window).  After I've taken some steps to protect my winter greens, I'll open the area up for the chickens, whose attentions will help to rid me of any pests in the mulch around the blueberry and black currant bushes - though they'll probably dig up more than a few of my strawberry plants at the same time.  Either way, chickens don't understand 'later.'

 

 

Jodie just turned 11 weeks old on the weekend, and she's fully feathered with what I think of as Araucana cheek feathers. She's not too pleased with me in this picture.

 

I've clipped the girls' wings before, but as I checked Celine's feathers I realized they'd had quite some time to grow back.  Jodie has her original flight feathers, so she'd likely encouraged her mother to  hop the fence for greener pastures.

 

It doesn't look pretty, but cutting only the ends of the wing feathers off is similar to clipping a human fingernail - the ends are not supplied with blood after they have grown out, and the clipping unbalances a bird, making flight awkward.  The birds eventually molt, and new, full wing feathers grow back in.

 

Nugget and Pilgrim don't have the full use of their clipped wings yet.  Here you can see Nugget's feathers being replaced by new growth, so all of the feathers lost in the yard out there weren't just from disputes about the pecking order.  I'd just realized that Pilgrim is looking a little ratty as her new head feathering comes in.

 

All four girls, walking the fence line with the neighbour's garden, and wishing they could get in there to dig up that dirt and look for bugs.  I'm glad to make certain they can't since there are also two dogs sharing the yard.

Planting Garlic and Bunny Comparisons

This year was my first experience with garlic rust, which made me a bit leery about my planting of our saved garlic this Fall.  Research said that there was no reason not to plant our cloves, but I decided to be a bit more proactive, and dunked the newly-separated cloves in buckets of water, with equal parts bleach and liquid kelp to disinfect and give a boost to next year's harvest.  I used a scientific 'glug' of each in a bucket of about 2.5 gallons of water.

As I separated out the cloves, I dropped them into their bath, where I left them while I prepared the holes for planting.  My reading says that they can be left in the water for up to 24 hours, and that treatment can be followed by a dip in rubbing alcohol or vodka (neither of which I had on hand).

 

I know I'm not the only gardener out there who suffers a twinge planting the biggest bulbs of the harvest.  This clove is a hardneck variety, likely Music, acclimated over three seasons here. I decided to plant one bed of hardneck and one of softneck as opposed to last year's chaos.  It should make garlic scape season a little less like a treasure hunt. Throwback at Trapper Creek, who's in Oregon, says she finds her hardneck keeps almost as long as the softneck, and the cloves are so much bigger and easier to peel that she has a preference for it.  We like the look of braids, for which softnecks are required, but the disease meant I sent all the greenery to the garbage this time around, snipped half and inch above the bulbs.  Food for thought...

 

As additional guard against dealing with rust, I increased my planting distance from 6 to 8 inches, so there is more room for air movement between the plants in the beds. This also means I downsized our harvest from 180 heads of garlic to about 130. Multiplier onions and shallots still need to be planted along the edges (fall planting is an experiment this year, using saved bulbs from this season's garden).

While I was making holes, my lovely husband was digging finished compost out of our two black bins, and we had the perfect amount to cover everything up.  What I didn't take a picture of was the
actual finished beds - tucked in with floating row cover, bricks weighing down the corners to discourage chicken 'exploration.' Still to come is a chicken wire fence around the plantings - this one will be sturdier than what protected the barley crop.

The bunnies and kits are doing well, although the tattooing seems to be a bit hit-and-miss, as the ink is still wearing off.  Sunday Adrian took our biggest and smallest kits out of their nesting boxes for comparison at 17 days (hint: I've dubbed the grey one 'Gigantor')

 

And the real comparison:

 

 

Can I hear an awwwwww?

Winter Is Coming

Over three days on the weekend, the hoop house went from its summer job as a growing area, to its winter service as a home for the chickens.  I hauled out the tomato cages, pulled vines, harvested *the absolute last* tomatoes, and Adrian managed to fit all of the greenery into the yard waste bin.  Because we cannot burn the tomato vines, and they can carry virus or disease from one season to the next, we send them to the city where their larger, turned compost pile will heat up much more than ours every could.

 

After cleaning the rabbitry, Adrian dumped the excess sawdust, wasted greens, and rabbit droppings onto the dirt, and topped that with fresh straw.  Over the winter, the chickens will add their own contributions to the straw, which will balance the nitrogen, and they'll scratch through all of the dirt; we'll add more straw, and they'll break down the waste, fertilizing the site for next year.  The dirt-covered frame under the chicken tractor has several passes of chicken wire to protect the girls from predators burrowing in - we learned that one the hard way.

 

 

While he was busy with that, I scrubbed and hosed out their living quarters, which are holding up quite well I think, for being built by newbies who had never built a chicken tractor or kept chickens before.  Of course, I should add that we had friends to help us through some of the process, though they'd never done anything like this before either. Tell you what though, we'll never build something this heavy again - whew!  Adrian was kind enough to crawl underneath, and attach their heat lamp and heated water bucket for the cold months, and voila!

 

Then we just had to wrangle the chickens into their winter digs....... I only had to chase them around the hoop house once!

Food For The Cold

As the temperature begins to drop at this time of year, my mealtime thoughts begin to turn towards warm, spicy food.  With our weather, Adrian has been seen tending the barbecue on the back porch during a seasonal downpour - but soups, stews, chili and other comfort foods made in the safety of the warm, well-lit kitchen (or happily pulled from the freezer) often feature prominently in our Fall and Winter dinners.

These temperatures outside also prompt a shift towards harvesting everything I can before I risk losing it to a sudden early frost or weeks of rainy days.  Yesterday was the first sunny day in a relatively long stretch.  The chickens were comically basking in the sunshine instead of huddling under cover, the bees were absolutely boiling about the hive, and the bunnies were napping, eyes contentedly closed between nibbles of alfalfa.  I was out there with my dad's old flannel vest to get some things tidied up and continue preparing the garden for some down-time.  I pulled the last of the dry bean plants to get them under cover before another round of rains turned *all* of them mouldy, planted more Winter Rye for the bunnies, pulled weeds, cleaned the cobwebs out of the rabbitry, re-applied Vaseline to the fruit tree barriers, and harvested all of the chard, celery leaf, oregano, sage, and tomatillos I needed to make a huge batch of chili.  The tomatoes that had ripened on the dining table, along with a generous helping of home-grown onions. dried vegetables and spices, and a selection of canned goods from our pantry went into a pot, and simmered into a delicious dinner and more servings for the freezer.

Of course, the tortilla chips with melted cheddar broiled on top helped round things out!

Rabbit Identification Day

This morning started off clear, if a bit chilly.  Shortly after beginning my day with a bit of yard clean up (yay! no rain), I looked out the window to see the beginning of a deluge (yay! rain....).  So it wasn't perfect timing when my friend called to say she was on her way over to help tattoo the kits for identification.

Luckily, by the time she arrived and we had set up, the rain had abated somewhat, and we were able to organize our gear on a table in the carport to weigh and tattoo all of the rabbits from the two 7-week-old litters.  I still couldn't swear as to the sex of the bunnies today (and Jen commiserated about how difficult that can be as we both peered closely as fuzzy bunny genitals).  Development at this age is minimal, and there's....well....a *lot* of fur down there.

So, with each bunny weighed, we slathered ink in their left ear (on which I had spread anesthetic cream an hour beforehand), and clamped the Ketchum tattoo pliers to make their mark, spread more ink, and then whisked the annoyed bunnies back to their cages.  Everyone got a bit of grain for good behaviour (well, mostly good!)

So, may I introduce kits H131 through H1310, weighing in between 2 pounds 7 ounces, and 3 pounds 4 ounces.

 

I don't like you anymore.

 

After tattooing, additional ink paste is rubbed into the tattoo holes to ensure a clear tattoo.  Why yes, those are fresh scratches on my hand.

 

Clearly, there are going to be some trust issues for a few days.

As I left them with their grain, the bunnies were recovering and consoling one another. (It's ok - the ink is edible.)