Hanging Out Poolside
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where brightly colored bathing suits are all the rage this year - and the longer we stare at frogs (which we feel you can never have too many of around) the more we're fascinated by them.
Doris's Bouncing Baby Boy, Two Days Old
Current lamb count: 30. Number of still pregnant ewes: 2. Number of days this ridiculously drawn out lambing season (our longest ever) has lasted so far: 79. Number of days we expected it to last: about 30. Number of questions about lambs, puppies, cows, roosters, baby chicks, wild mushrooms, coyotes, and Sarah Kate's Mickey Mouse nose you've asked lately in the comments section that I haven't had a chance to answer: an embarrassingly large number. (Sorry!)
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where we'd probably get a lot more done around here if we weren't constantly bombarded by so much cuteness.
With My Heartstrings
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where when you're faced with a scene like this, there's nothing to do but pull out the camera you always carry with you (for just such occasions) and quickly start clicking away. Lessons can come later.
This Dinner Courtesy of Cooking With Shelburne Farms
Remember these mouthwatering grilled lamb burgers on homemade buns with roasted red pepper, parsley, and kalamata olive relish I made last fall from Cooking with Shelburne Farms: Food and Stories from Vermont? Remember my raving about how much I fell head over heels in love with this marvelous book? (If not, go back and read this post.)
Well this beautiful $35 hardcover book - which would make a wonderful gift for any food lover in your life - is on sale right now at Amazon.com for just $7.99,** with free shipping on orders over $25. Got more than one foodie friend? Talk about an easy way to stock up and save on special gifts.
The book contains stories from farmers and other food producers along with more than 100 recipes featuring nine iconic Vermont ingredients: Milk and Cheese, Maple, Early Spring and Summer Greens, Lamb, Wild Mushrooms, Game and Fish, Pork, Root-Cellar Vegetables, and Apples. The dishes deliver rustic flavors with a "fresh, comfortable cooking approach."
Recipes range from the everyday--Sausage Rolls and Deviled Ham & Cheddar Spread--to the extraordinary: Roast Duck Legs with Sour Cherry Sauce and Sage & Garlic Pan-Roasted Quail. Classic dishes are given fresh twists, and unexpected ingredients are paired in contemporary ways.
The recipes are well written and easy to follow. Each one offers a "Before You Start" paragraph that gives helpful advice on everything from sourcing the best ingredients to making substitutions, and the Prepare-Ahead Tips make preparation even easier. The sections of sumptuous, full-color photos will no doubt have you drooling all over your beautiful new cookbook.
Which reminds me - I need to pull my copy off the kitchen shelf and check out all the summer recipes I was dying to try last fall. Can one ever have too many recipes or too many cookbooks (especially when they're on sale)? I think not!
**Note: If the bargain price is currently not showing (it disappeared last night just as I finished this post but reappeared this morning), new copies of Cooking With Shelburne Farms are also available at bargain prices from other sellers through Amazon. From this link, click where it says More Buying Choices: Used & New Copies on the right side of the screen.
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where we love cookbooks so much we're afraid to count up how many we actually own. Sometimes it's better not to look, just to cook.
Snugglebunny's Twin Boy Trying to Reach Some Lunch on 5/6
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where all the new lambs are now happily munching on fresh spring grass in the fields, which is well within their reach. Well, except Doris' baby boy who was just born this evening. For now he's sticking with milk.
Do They Look Hungover or What?
And We Appear to Have Just Lost Dan
So how was your holiday weekend?
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where it's obvious that some of the animals around here lead secret lives we don't know about - and you know it's been a wild and crazy night when the next morning none of the donkeys are able to hold their ears up, let alone stand up.
Sarah Kit Kat Kate
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where it's nice to know somebody's making good use of this poor neglected planter - and we just realized that this is the 54th Daily Dose of Cute, but the very first one to feature a cat. Looks like we have some serious explaining to do.
Morning mushroom score!*
I actually found and photographed these gorgeous morel mushrooms, all 1¼ pounds (!) of them, back on April 23rd, then promptly forgot about the photos until the other day when I noticed that wild mushrooms had started popping up around the blogosphere. It seems morel season here in southern Missouri (when all the forces of nature come together in the right way and we actually have one, that is) happens early. In many places the time to find morels has only just begun.
This is probably my biggest morel score ever, discovered on a warm and muggy morning following a nice rainstorm the previous day - perfect mushroom growing weather. I actually bestowed this entire bounty upon a foodie friend in the city who was blown away by my willingness to part with them.
"Tell me you saved some for yourself," he said.
"Actually, no."
"What?!"
"It's okay. It's the beginning of the season - I might find some more. And besides, it's not like they're chanterelles." If they were chanterelles - which I've only found a few times in all my 13 years of living in Missouri - I wouldn't have even told him about them. Yes, I can really be that selfish when it comes to hard-to-find food that I love.
Small morel mushroom in its natural habitat
In this case, though, my generosity was rewarded because a few days later Joe (who had never tasted a morel in his life but now loves them because I foolishly forced some on him several years ago) and I happened upon several giant specimens in a spot on the farm we'd never checked before. It was as if somebody had sprinkled steroids on the soil; some of them were an astonishing 5 or 6 inches long, not including the stems. We feasted.
One of these years I should probably try doing something a little more imaginative with my morels, but I always end up just cutting them into pieces (after soaking them in salted water to remove the dirt and any bugs lurking inside) and sautéeing them in butter with a sprinkling of salt. This time we enjoyed the simple preparation alongside grilled, grass-fed steaks from our own farm-raised beef, plenty of pain au levain to sop up all that marvelous juice, and glasses of a nice cabernet. Wow.
My foodie city friend made his morels last for two meals, one shared with his foodie girlfriend (sautéed with butter and a little white wine and served over ribeye steaks) and the other with a foodie friend who was recovering from knee surgery. In a thank you e-mail he reported that they were "Fabulous! Fabulous! Fabulous! And that was three separate opinions."
Our morel season consisted of just those two days this year - it was very short but very delicious. I recently read that morel mushrooms were selling for $48 per pound at a Chicago farmers' market, which made me even more appreciative of our elusive gourmet gathering.
Have you ever found morels in your kitchen, by way of a walk through the forest or the farmers' market? What did you do with them?
* Foraging for wild mushrooms can be a wonderful and rewarding thing to do, but you should never taste (or even touch) a wild mushroom unless you are 110% sure that it is edible. Most mushrooms are poisonous, and many are deadly. Please be smart and stay safe!
© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the foraging foodie farm blog where morel mushroom season might be over, but the wet, warm, and muggy weather has just begun, which means there's still hope of finding wild edible boletus, puffball, chicken of the woods, and yes, even my beloved chanterelle mushrooms - and there are already scary (yet fascinating) looking poisonous mushrooms popping up all over the place.
My idea of vacation party fare
I often tell people that my life on the farm revolves around food. Basically everything I do around here - whether it's putting up hay (next month!), freezing tomatoes, fixing fences, feeding the chickens, sowing lettuce seeds, spreading donkey manure in the organic heirloom kitchen garden, or making sure a newborn lamb is nursing - is in some way responsible for eventually puting food in our and other peoples' mouths.
For a foodie farmgirl whose mind is never very far from her next meal, this is extremely good news, because even the most loathesome task (that would be putting up hay) is a lot easier to bear if you tell yourself that doing it will keep you from starving to death.
Food played a large part in my life before I moved to the country, but in a different - and much less work-related - way. Most of my fondest memories have to do with eating, especially while traveling. Some people go on vacation looking for beautiful scenery, amazing architecture, or some really good fly fishing. I go on vacation to eat.
Many years ago I spent a glorious couple of weeks in New England hopping from one historic diner to the next (passing up the free breakfasts at bed & breakfast inns so as to squeeze in even more diner fare), and I once took an 80-mile detour while driving through Arkansas in order to sample some highly recommended, but very out of the way, barbecue.
It was worth it, but to this day I wish I'd had room for one of their fabulous looking desserts. I'm a sucker for a piece of good homemade pie.
Other unforgettable food-related moments I've enjoyed over the years include high tea at Harrod's department store in London while living briefly in England as a kid, a hunk of Hula Pie for lunch (not dessert, but lunch) at the Kapalua Grill & Bar on Maui, and way too much breakfast (that had to include a pile of those signature home-fried potatoes and one of their enormous, freshly baked drop biscuits) in a booth on a crowded Sunday morning at Bubba's diner in San Anselmo, California.
Then there was the black rice pudding at a table in the tropical garden of Poppy's Restaurant on Bali, and a tiny taste cup of Cherry Garcia ice cream scooped right off the assembly line at the Ben & Jerry's ice cream factory in Vermont. Actually I did the Ben & Jerry's tour twice.
Living on a farm puts a pretty big damper on vacations, but that's okay. These days my idea of a perfect getaway is spending a couple of days on the farm but blowing off most of the work - and sometimes that's almost sort of kind of possible. On the rare occasion I do leave for more than a day, it's usually to visit friends or family in some exotic and decidedly non-foodie place like Kentucky.
The truth is that besides having become a great big homebody, I'm probably unfit to travel. The other night as I was unhooking the bib of my overalls, Joe looked over as a couple of syringes dropped out of one of the pockets and onto the floor.
"It's a good thing you don't like to fly anymore," he said, shaking his head. "I'd never get you past airport security."
Fortunately I'm also a cheap and easy to please traveler. I love it when there's good country cooking to be found and make an effort to seek out local hole-in-the-wall eateries. But give me a motel room, a bottle of cheap champagne on ice, and a big bag of plain potato chips and I'm perfectly content. Throw in air conditioning and a container of dip and I'm practically at Club Med.
One of the things I love to do while visiting another place is scope out the grocery stores. Despite the profusion of cookie cutter malls and big box behomeths taking over the landscape, there are still some interesting local and regional food stuffs to be found around the country.
When Joe and I were in Cincinnati few years ago, I discovered an entire section in the supermarkets there devoted to nothing but pretzels. This apparently has to do with the German influence in the area (which also means you can find some really good bratwurst). There are so many different kinds of pretzels available that they literally get their very own aisle. So along with my enormous bag of 'I'm on vacation' potato chips, we picked out several packages of pretzels.
Then Joe announced that we needed some dip to go with our pretzels and chips, and we proceeded over to the dairy section where he tossed a carton of something I swear only said DIP into our cart. What a turning point! How had I been missing DIP all these years? This was vacation party food at its finest!
There are many things, like that black rice pudding in Bali, that can never be fully recreated at home, often because at least half of the memory has to do with the atmosphere. Even perfectly made black rice pudding served in a Northern California suburban kitchen simply doesn't taste the same.
Fortunately DIP does not suffer from this problem. DIP can be thoroughly enjoyed anywhere, anytime, and this homemade version I was inspired to create tastes infinitely better (and is better for you) than that slightly scary - but very exciting - stuff from the store. Of course it would be even better if I served it up in one of those cartons labeled DIP.
We generally try to hide out on the farm during holidays, so we don't have any big plans for this Memorial Day weekend. I could really use a little vacation, though, so I'm thinking I may have to dash into town for a big bag of potato chips and whip up a batch of dip. The cheap champagne is already chilling in the fridge.
So what's your favorite (or most embarrassing) food-related travel memory - or favorite vacation/party food?
Susan's Sour Cream & Onion Vacation Party Dip
2 cups sour cream (light is fine)
1/2 cup mayonnaise
4 to 5 scallions, green & white parts, chopped
1/3 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/3 cup dried onion flakes
1 teaspoon onion powder (or granulated)
1 teaspoon garlic powder (or granulated)
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
A smidge of anchovy paste (optional)
Salt & pepper to taste
Combine all ingredients in a small bowl and chill for several hours. Serve with potato chips, pretzels, tortilla chips, cut up veggies, or a spoon. If desired, close your eyes and pretend you're on vacation in your idea of paradise while consuming.
Still hungry? You'll find links to all my sweet and savory Less Fuss, More Flavor recipes in the Farmgirl Fare Recipe Index.
© FarmgirlFare.com, the chip and dipping foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares stories, photos, original recipes, and sometimes embarrassing foodie glimpses into her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.
Very Off Duty (taken 4/23)
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where there's always plenty of work to be done around the farm, but nobody's expected to be on duty (or even conscious) all of the time. Except Lucky Buddy Bear of course, who lives to work. He'll occasionally shut his eyes while guarding the garden or babysitting, and he spends time hibernating in his lair under The Shack, but in 6 years nobody has ever actually seen this Australian/English Shepherd sleep.
Bear Loves Babies!
Current Lamb Count: 28. Number of still pregnant sheep: only 4! Number of ewes who don't mind when Bear wants to help clean up their new lambs: only a few.
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where The Nanny Bear (pictured here with Zelda's twins) is on the job - whether the mothers like it or not.
Zelda & Her Newborn Twins Yesterday Afternoon
© Copyright 2008 Farmgirl Fare.com, the award-winning blog where we have a sheep named Zelda because back in 2004 when we decided to give all the ewe lambs born that year 'A' names (then 'B' names in 2005, 'C' names in 2006, etc. - which was a brilliant idea) I said to Joe, "This two-year old sheep needs a name!" and without skipping a beat he said, "Zelda." I asked why. "Because I doubt we'll ever make it to 'Z!'" It suits her perfectly.
Bye Bye Big Belly, Hello Little Boy & Girl
Thank goodness. You know she's got to be feeling better now that those babies are on the ground, especially since it's 90 degrees in the shade today. As you can see, though, her appetite hasn't diminished. More photos to follow - Zelda's very proud. And her twins are very cute!
© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where sometimes all you have to do to jump start lambing season is leave the farm for a while - which is what happened yesterday afternoon. All three are doing just fine.
Dinky Donkey on July 14th, Age 12 Days
Just over a year ago I brought home two girlfriends for Donkey Doodle Dandy. Dolores was already pregnant when she arrived, and on July 2nd she gave birth to Dinky. Dinky was supposed to go live with a friend on another farm several months ago, but she's having a fencing - or, more precisely, a lack of fencing - situation, which I understand completely.
Meanwhile Dan's other girlfriend, Daphne, is expecting Dan's baby, which we thought she was going to have a month ago. Instead she just keeps getting bigger, kind of like poor Zelda. Maybe she's waiting for lambing season (which keeps dragging on and on) to be done - or at least for Zelda to be done.
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where the photos are sometimes actually taken the same day they're posted - just not lately. But cute is cute no matter when it's from, right?
The New Pups Love to Get Wet (taken April 11th)
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where yesterday's nice big rainfall started our beloved weather creek flowing again (though thankfully not at flood level) - and even though the days are getting longer, they're still too short to do everything that needs to be done.
Spotted by the Barn
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where the spring box is full of eggs, frogs are hopping up everywhere, and the nightly summer serenade has already begun. There's nothing quiet about springtime on the farm!
Hello!
© Copyright FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where everybody likes to have their own distinguishing attribute, even if the only choice left is to look a little lopsided - and all the lambs eventually grow into their wrinkles.
First Day Out Of The Bonding Suite Is Exciting & Exhausting
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where this little guy has been feeling under the weather since this photo was taken last week, but thanks to some tasty vitamin paste, plenty of fluids, and lots of TLC - plus another stay in a private bonding suite with his mom - he seems to finally be perking back up. Today he received the Vitamin D treatment - a day out in the sunshine on fresh green grass. Now that ought to do it.
Hopefully soon!
This is Zelda. She is, as you can see, extremely pregnant. Last year she had twins - and was the very first sheep to give birth. This year she just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger. A week and a half ago I put her in a bonding suite because she was so enormous I figured she was going to have a baby or two any minute.
Nothing happened. For six days.
My guilt and her well being demanded that she be let out, and I figured Sheep Freedom Day was the perfect time. All that fresh spring grass would no doubt jump start her into labor, just like at the New York pizzeria I read about years ago where pregnant women past their due date order a special prego pizza and proceed to go into labor, sometimes while still at the restaurant.
My plan worked beautifully—for two other pregnant ewes.
Meanwhile Zelda is now back in a bonding suite, complaining loudly and looking impossibly huge. Any time, Zelda, any time!
Current lamb count: 27. Number of still pregnant ewes, including Zelda: 5. Number of pregnant ewes who will probably give birth before Zelda: 4.
© FarmgirlFare.com, the any minute foodie farm blog where every day feels like Mother's Day this time of year.
No More Hay! Yay! Yay! Yay!
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where the best part about Sheep Freedom Day is watching the wooly pile up that occurs when the first sheep out of the barn door come to a screeching halt the second they hit sweet spring grass - while giving no thought whatsoever to the dozens of sheep racing toward freedom behind them.
Or Just A Puppy?
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where some of us need more puppy training than the puppies do. It's been a while since we've had to remember to never put anything you don't want to be chewed up laying on, or even dangling near, the ground - which is why one of us is now walking around in a holey hat and a fancy new bra decorated with puppy puncture marks.
Did I Do Something Wrong?
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where the misbehaving, escape artist new puppies (who are a mix of Anatolian Shepherd, Komondor, and Great Pyrenees) are driving some of us nuts - but as soon as you get mad at them they look at you like this. More puppy details on the way, I promise.
Pollinating Sedum Autumn Joy Last September
Some of you know about my love for moths and butterflies. I find myself constantly awed by these remarkable creatures, and of course it would be nearly impossible to have any sort of garden without them. Well if I'm in love, then Swiss photographer Thomas Marent is obsessed - and in a good way. His gigantic new hardcover book, simply titled Butterfly, includes more than 500 amazing photographs of butterflies and moths in each stage of their life cycles.
Thanks to the nice people at DK Publishing, I have a brand new copy of Butterfly to give away. You can learn more about this bigger than life-size book, see the photos of a mating pair of luna moths I took one morning in the garden (those colors!), and sign up to win over on my kitchen garden blog - because that's where the moths and butterflies like to be.
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where a butterfly bonanza is always sure to bring a smile - and more flowers!
Kids Eat Free!
Sorry, No Puppies
© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where it's too bad the new puppies (who are - for those of you who have been asking - Anatolian Shepherd, Komondor, and Great Pyrenees) don't actually eat hay, since at this feeding rate we're probably going to have to start buying kibble by the ton.
Dreaming of something greener than hay for lunch.
Wondering who Cary is? Meet her in A Tiny Tail For Mother's Day.
It's hard to believe that my little girl is already two years old, but that's what the calendar tells me so I suppose it must be true. Cary had a quiet and uneventful birthday today, as the ewes and lambs spent the day stuck in the barnyard like they have every day for the past few months.
We're just about out of our carefully hoarded homegrown hay, though, so tomorrow she'll probably get to gorge herself on some of those greener pastures. Happy birthday, baby.
Want to see more of Cary?
The Cary Chronicles: Big Day For A Little Lamb
Cary Is Two Months Old Today!
Cary Is Three Months Old Today!
Cary Is Four Months Old Today! (And still allowed in the house)
Cary Is Five Months Old Today!
Cary Is Six Months Old Today!
Cary Is Seven Months Old Today!
Carybunga! Nine Months Old and Coming at You!
3/7/07: Cary Turned 10 Months Old Yesterday
Cary Is One Year Old Today!
11/18/06: Cary's Last Dish of Treats in the House
12/7/06: Cary Goes Grunge
12/19/06: Cary Can Find a Snack Anywhere
12/31/06: Farm Life Is Exhausting
1/7/07: What I Learned From Cary Last Year (Plus lots of links to photos of Cary laying waste to the kitchen garden)
1/7/07: Yeah, So?
2/11/07: Cary's First Woolcut
2/18/07: With the Nanny Bear on Sheep Shearing Day
4/13/07: Harvesting Beets with Cary
5/5/07: Pushover
12/6/07: Finally, A Cary Update
3/12/08: Cary Babies?
3/13/08: Cary, No Baby
4/18/08: A Little Look Back at Cary
4/18/08: Cary Update: Too Hungry To Say Hi
4/28/08: Meet and Greet with Cary
5/6/08: Back to Baby Cary
7/25/08: Let Me Out Already
8/19/08: Cary Scratches an Itch
© FarmgirlFare.com, the woolly foodie farm blog where there are currently 104 critters on the farm (no wonder it takes so long to feed everybody!), but only one sheep who spent her babyhood curled up at my feet while I sat at the computer and snuffling up treats in the living.
The book contains stories from farmers and other food producers along with more than 100 recipes featuring nine iconic Vermont ingredients: Milk and Cheese, Maple, Early Spring and Summer Greens, Lamb, Wild Mushrooms, Game and Fish, Pork, Root-Cellar Vegetables, and Apples. The dishes deliver rustic flavors with a "fresh, comfortable cooking approach."
Thanks to the nice people at DK Publishing, I have a brand new copy of Butterfly to give away. You can learn more about this bigger than life-size book, see the photos of a mating pair of luna moths I took one morning in the garden (those colors!), and sign up to win over on my kitchen garden blog - because that's where the moths and butterflies like to be.
