Ten Dollar Food Challenge

NPR recently did a series in which they asked chefs to create a family meal for four for under $10 total. There were a number of interesting creations, and the series is well worth listening to: even more enlightening is reading the submissions from readers at the web site. There are literally hundreds of recipes. Some, of course, are either facetious (boxed mac'n'cheese) or just plain terrible, but there were a very large number of delicious sounding ideas.

It occurrede to me that as a budget-concious housewife, many of the meals that are part of my weekly rotation are probably cheap enough to qualify. I did a little bit of quick in-my-head estimating, and came up with several. Of course, most of thrift is foresightedness: do you have frozen homemade chicken stock in your freezer? I do. Leftover cooked white rice or plain pasta? Yup. Cooking in bulk - when appropriate - is a great way to save money as well as time.

Here are a couple of my favorite cheap recipes:

Mexican Risotto

Risotto always feels luxurious, but it is actually cheaper than dirt to make, unless you are using fresh morels or something like that (oh ho! But I trade for my morels!).

1.5 c arborio rice
1 big yellow onion
2 fresh pobalno peppers
a little bit of white wine, if you have an open bottle
olive oil
cumin seed
garlic
chicken stock

chop and sautee the onion and poblano peppers with the garlic and cumin seed. Add rice, stir with a wooden spoon to coat. When rice grains begin to turn transluscent, add wine (if using) or a little bit of hot stock. Keep adding stock in 1/2 cup increments, stirring frquently, until rice is creamy and just barely al dente. Salt and fresh ground black pepper to taste. Serve with heated corn tortillas and a little bit of crumbled queso gfresco on top. If you wanted to be fancier and more authentic, roast and peel the peppers, slice into strips (rajas) and add them at the end.

Summer Tabouli

this is cheapest in the summer, of course. It might not come in under ten dollars if you don't have a vegetable garden, but it would still be cheap.

1.5 cup fine bulgar
olive oil
lemon juice (1 large or 2 small lemons)
green onions
parsley
mint
(the more herbs the better)
1 cucumber
1 or 2 tomatoes
(note: really, you can use whatever herbs and vegetables you have. Got a beet? grate it fine. Ditto a carrot. No green onions? Okay, use a finely chopped white or red one. The only must haves are parsley and mint.)
some kind of cheese - feta is best
some kind of olives - kalamatas are my favorite
1 can garbanzo beans

In a very large bowl, pour boiling water over the bulgar. Let sit while you finely chop all your vegetables and herbs. If this takes you twenty minutes, your bulgar will be soft and ready. To the bulgar, add at least two tablespoons of olive oil and the lemon juice. Then the drained and rinsed can of garbanzos. Then the olives. Make sure the tabouli is cool before adding the crumbled cheese and the herbs and veggies. Taste before salting: cheese and olives are salty. Add fresh ground pepper to taste. Other good things to add: chopped pepperocinis or jalapenos; basil; capers; baby spinach

Oh and here's an easy recipe: use the same salad ingrediants but use toasted bread cubes as the base starch: presto, bread salad. Good way to use up your old stale bread. For bread salad I like to use a lot of tomato and maybe some anchovies.

Quick and Dirty Chilaquiles

corn tortillas are one of the best, cheapest staples around. A giant bag of fifty costs about three bucks. Just make sure they are fresh. But here's what to do with them when they get stale.

On a cookie sheet, place twelve to twenty corn tortillas -separated- and bake until dry and not very flexible. Turning them once helps. Then break them into pieces and place them in a large baking dish, like a lasagna pan. Set aside.

Drain and rinse a can of black beans. scatter them over the tortillas.
also scatter one chopped yellow onion.

In a blender, blend 1 large can of tomatoes with a small can of pickled jalapenos. Or a half a can.

Pour this sauce over the tortillas and let soak in for about ten minutes. Top with sliced mozzerella or jack cheese and bake until cheese is bubbly. Yum.

I could easily come up with another three or four super cheap recipes - even before I get to soup!

How about you all? What do you feed your families when the cupboard is bare?

Hello, Poppy!

The baby pony has a name. Poppy. Here's your daily dose of cute:

Production Going Up

Since we killed the egg-eating hen, I've been collecting about sixteen eggs a day. The trade network is not capable of absorbing this many eggs. Berry man is all out of berries, until the new crop that is, and so he has stopped getting eggs. Bread man stopped a while ago (darn it - he really is a fantastic baker). I still have a couple of regular cash customers, but they collectively take only about four dozen eggs a week. 

Luckily, eggs keep well. I'm sure that more customers and trade opportunities will pop up. Just yesterday, I was talking to a guy about trading my eggs and possibly meat for his wildcrafted morels. Hope that pans out. 

I've also started milking. Just a little. Xana is still a complete butt, and will not jump up on the stand. And since she's a first freshener and feeding twins, she doesn't have a lot of milk left over. It's kind of hardly worth it, wrestling her hairy ass up on the stanchion for a scant cup of milk. But I have to do it, just as training for her. Sooner or later her twins will be weaned and then I will want all her milk. 

 Iris, on the other hand, is giving me a generous quart a day, and this is less than two weeks after her baby was born! Most people wouldn't even start milking so soon, but Iris has a serious case of overproduction. Her baby can't begin to drain her abundant udder. If I left her alone, she'd naturally downregulate to suit his needs. But I don't want to let her do that: I want to keep her in fairly high gear so I can get to making cheese!

My garden is producing too: weeds. I gave up. I have nice beds of weeds. If  search diligently, I can find enough baby spinach and radishes among the weeds to make a decent salad. That's just going to have to do. I don't have time. Except for tomatoes! Bibi helped me plant fifteen tomato plants, and I WILL weed the tomatoes. Swear. 

Most of my vegetables this summer will be coming from the kale fairy, just like last year. She's the nice lady who traded me for eggs all last summer, and this summer is trading for a kid (of the caprine variety, not the human variety). I call her the kale fairy because last year she showered us with more kale than I've eaten in my entire life before - not that I'm complaining. I adore kale. My husband - well. Let's just say he's not quite such a fan of kale as I am. This year she promised us she would plant a little less kale and a little more other stuff. 

As a matter of fact, if I remember right, she said she'd have our first delivery ready in the last part of May. Maybe I should get in touch. I'm about ready for some kale.

Circle of Blogs

"Recommended site: The Survivalist Blog - Live better, live Cheaper and survive when things get tough." This is a cool site to cruise for anyone interested in doing more for themselves.

I discover new blogs mostly because somebody has decided to follow my blog. Whenever I notice that I have a new follower - something that hasn't happened in a while... am I getting boring? - I always check out that person's profile and if they have a blog, I go over and take a look. Then I look at the list of blogs they follow... etc. I have found a number of interesting sites this way. They tend to fall into four categories: Cooking blogs, farming blogs, fiber blogs, and survivalist blogs.

I'm not sure how I got into the circle of survivalist blogs. I guess because of tags on my posts saying "self-sufficiency," by which I mean things like canning your own produce, not building your own bunker. It's funny to see how the two ends of the political spectrum meet up in this area. Crunchy hippies brewing their own biodiesel and their own beer are suddenly kissing cousins to NRA members and rock-ribbed right wingers worried about zombies. 

It's no secret which end of the spectrum I'm on, yet I find myself turning to these blogs for information on what kind of handgun I should get for dispatching pigs and goats (don't worry, I don't own a gun, yet). The ideology that drives us may be very different, but the skills we learn and the actions we ultimately take are strikingly similar. I hope that internet exchanges between survivalist/homesteader blogs may lead to greater understanding and tolerance, at least in individual cases.

I know I've had my mind opened a little bit reading the blogs of people I might not have sought out as friends. The political divide should not hamper our learning from each other and enjoying each other's journals of our activities in pursuit of happiness and independence. Hooray for the internet! And thank you to all the survivalists out there who are putting out terrific information.

I Got a Pony, Neener Neener Neener

This morning when I went out to feed the animals, I noticed that Rosie Pony wasn't in the barn. So I went looking for her out in the pasture. I saw her lying down by the fence, and I thought "Oh my God, she's having the baby right now!"

But actually she had already had the baby. It was lying down right behind her. My guess is that she had been born a while ago, in the middle of the night, because when she hopped right up and started nursing, it didn't look like she was figuring it out for the first time. 

She's a filly, yes, and a good sized one, too. Chestnut with a wide white blaze. 

I moved all the goats out of the big pasture and into the little one with the alpacas. I put fresh dry straw down in the barn and with the help of the farrier, who came over the take a look, I got them both into the barn where it's warmer and dryer. It's a cold wet day here. Mama is very skittish and fiercely protective of her baby, but that's as it should be. The farrier told me to make sure I get out there and put my hands all over that baby several times a day so that Rosie learns that I'm not going to hurt her.

Okay. You don't have to twist my arm. You might as well tell a little girl to make sure and eat as much cotton candy as she can. I could barely tear myself away long enough to come in an post this.

Yay. I'm so happy.

Yay Flopsy!!

Flopsy was bred just a week after Iris, to the same buck. But for months, I wasn't sure if she was pregnant. Is she or isn't she? Her belly, like that of all goats, would expand and contract according to what she was eating. Sometimes she looked gigantic, other times pretty normal. It didn't help that she's a fat little thing. Even her udder wasn't much help. Was it getting a little thicker? Maybe, but there was certainly nothing you could call a bag.

Well bag or no, it's got milk in it, and mammals don't make milk unless they are pregnant. So there. More babies on the way! Hooray!

Two Down, Two to Go

Finally!!! 

After two whole days of my staring at her butt (not quite nonstop- my husband drew the line when I said I might sleep out in the barn), Iris decided I wasn't going to go away until she had a baby. 

She took her time about it, and she only gave me one, but he's a big one. Here it is, in glorious technicolor: Birth..... of a Buckling!

                                               Sex Education, Farm Style

         Feet. As soon as I saw these hooves coming, I knew we had a big boy on the way.

         Not even all the way out, and already bleating and trying to get up.

                                                 Up and at 'em! 

As happy as I am that Iris finally gave birth, I have to admit to a little disappointment. I never thought Iris would throw a single, after giving me twins as a first freshener last year. And it's a boy, which we can't keep, and he's a boring old solid brown with no markings at all. Oh well. I should just thank providence that we have a healthy mama and a healthy baby. A singleton means more milk for me! And this little guy is a fighter. He was trying to stand up while his hind legs were still inside his mama. And big, too. Big healthy boy from excellent lines. Maybe we can sell him as an intact buck. In the meantime, we'll just enjoy another baby goat around the place.

Now there's just Flopsy left to go, and Rosie Pony of course! 

No Freakin' babies!

Where are the freakin' babies?????

Thinking Out Loud

Iris and Flopsy, the two goats who were sick, are much better now. I think the terrible diarrhea was caused by the Ivermectin - a wormer - that I gave them. They had both had moderate diarrhea for a week or so, and when I brought fecals in to the vet, they showed a "moderate" load of stomach worms. I asked if I should just wait until they had kidded, but the vet suggested I go ahead and worm them. I wormed the whole herd. My guess is that the medication caused the expulsion of everything in them along with the worms. I'm glad, of course, that it seems to have resolved, but I have a number of questions to answer if I want to be a better goat husbandry-man (goat husbander? not, surely, goat husband?). 

Iris and Flopsy are distinct from the rest of the herd in two ways: They are pregnant; and they are the only Nubians. Pregnancy is known to cause a lowered immune response, and that may very well be the reason that they were troubled by worms when no-one else was. Then again, Nubians have the reputation of being rather delicate compared to other breeds. They are an African breed, adapted to a much drier and warmer climate than exists here in western Washington. I guess the only way to distinguish between these two factors is to wait until they aren't pregnant anymore and see if they are still particularly susceptible to parasites. If so, I may switch to another breed, even though I adore the Nubians. Hardiness matters more to me that adorability. Plus, I like LaMancha milk more than I like Nubian milk.

Questions about individual goats aside, worms are going to be an ongoing problem. They are in almost every goat herd in this area. I was lucky; I started out with clean land that had never been used by ruminants before. And I started out with healthy goats. But apparently, no goat is ever completely worm free. A year and a half later, I have enough worms that they will continue to be a problem unless I adopt some very stringent management techniques. 

You can't simply nuke the worms with medication. You'll kill your goats before you kill all the worms. The idea is to have supremely healthy animals, animals who can tolerate a small number of parasites without becoming symptomatic. And, of course, to avoid a "parasite-crisis" in which the worm-load becomes high enough to sicken even your healthiest goats. That means:

1) rotational grazing. This is probably the most important component. The life cycle of the most common and problematic worms is 3 weeks. Therefore, when you worm the goats, switch pastures about 48 hours later. They will expel all the worms on the first pasture, and then go graze on a clean pasture. As long as you keep them off the wormy pasture for more than 3 weeks, the worms will die before they can be ingested again. Also, be mindful of the "parasite zone." According to my reading, larvae can climb up a grass stem to a height of approximately 4 inches. When the grass has been cropped to below four inches, it's time to rotate pastures. Of course, goats prefer browse to grass anyway, and if you have woody browse and bushes and blackberries and such for them to eat, they will largely ignore the grass. Most books say you need a minimum of three pastures to rotate through, and four is better. I have three.

2) a sensible worming program that avoids - as much as possible - resistance. In some areas, worms have already become very resistant to most wormers. That's not the case where I am, thankfully. I have three classes of wormers to choose from, and so far I have used only one of them. If I use it according to my vet's guidelines, I hope it will remain effective for many years. If not, well, there's always the other two classes. 

3) Good husbandry (there it is again) that promotes and maintains your animal's health. That means good barn hygiene (replacing soiled bedding promptly, feeding from mangers off the ground, adequate ventilation, etc), adequate nutrition year round, vigilant hoof care to avoid foot rot, and prompt attention to any health issues that crop up. Also, no stressing the animals through overcrowding or overbreeding. 

Sheesh. And that's just off the top of my head. 

Flying Fleece

Man am I filthy. I mean truly, utterly, disgustingly grimy. 

Here's what I've done today to get this way: cleaned out two barns, all the way, because two of my goats have terrible diarrhea. I pitched the hay, scraped the floors, rinsed the floors, and sprayed everything with bleach water. Then I dosed the sick goats with kaopectate, a procedure that involved a certain amount of wrestling. Wrestling goats with explosive diarrhea. One of the sick goats is Iris, who is now two days overdue to give birth. I really hope she holds off another few days until this tummy thing resolves. Birth is gross enough without adding pints of liquid poo into the mix.

Then the guy came to shear the alpacas. I didn't have time to shower and change, I just jumped right in to catching and holding down the terrified alpacas while they were sheared. They bellowed and sprayed half digested grass from their mouths and kicked up dirt and sand and poo. The wind was blowing pretty hard. I have little fleece bits in my hair, eyes, clothes. And other stuff, no doubt.

It was pretty fun, though (alpaca wrassling, not goat wrestling.). Finally, we could pet them to our heart's content, while they were in four point restraint. The fleeces are gorgeous, heavy and velvety and beautiful. Now Rowan has got three months to process and sell enough fleece to convince me that the alpacas are worth their keep. Today's work cost us $115.  

But the pictures alone are worth that. Now that I've published them, I'm going to take a shower. A long shower.

                                                 Miguel resists arrest

                                                             Not so feisty now, are you?

                                            The Girls get to pet Benji

           

Who the hell are you?

                                                        Under the fluff

Thumb Twiddling

Waiting, waiting. Ho Hum, waiting some more. 

Iris is as big as a house, and so uncomfortable, but no sign of true labor yet. 

The pony, Rosie, is showing signs of getting close. Her udder has filled out, and the teats have gone from shriveled and wrinkled to smooth and plump. The brochure I got from the vet said that happened in the last three days, but in Rosie's case it's already been more than a week. I don't think anyone can predict animal labor, just like human labor. It starts when it starts, and until it starts, there's no telling.

Waiting. I hate waiting.

I Don't Think So

After doing some research, I don't think the goats have chicken lice. They probably have goat lice. There is such a thing as chicken lice, but it doesn't infest goats. Nor vice versa.

False Labor and Lousy Critters

Iris tricked me last night. She had me totally convinced she was in labor; so convinced, I called my sister (who wanted to see goats being born) and made her drive 25 miles. So convinced, in fact, that I gloved up and went in (more on that later).  But she wasn't.

I've seen three goats give birth now, and they all acted pretty much the same when they went into labor: they nickered and looked at their bellies; they got up and laid down repeatedly; they yawned and ground their teeth; they stretched and held their tails in a particular, distinctive fashion. Iris was doing all of those things. Her udder was full and her tail-root was raised. 

But after four hours, nothing had changed. That's a very long time in goat-labor. I called the vet, and he said I should do an internal exam to see if her cervix was closed (good) or open (bad). If closed, we could wait because true labor hadn't started yet. If open, we had an emergency, because it meant that the babies were all tangled up and unable to progress down the birth canal. 

Well, I wasn't too thrilled, but I did it. We got Iris on the stanchion and fed her some grain to keep her happy - well, distracted, anyway - while I slowly and with plenty of lubrication tried to find out what was going on. But I couldn't get my hand in. Her vagina was stretchy and accommodating (that ought to get me a few hits), but the bones of her pelvis were immobile and I couldn't get past them to the cervix.  I figured this had to mean that she wasn't really in labor yet and probably not even close. Long before labor starts, the ligaments and tendons in the whole area become extremely relaxed, and my hand should have slipped in like a carrot into a washtub. So I washed up and went inside to sleep. 

                                                  Me with my hand halfway up a goat

Well, no harm done. iris didn't really care one way or the other, and she's fine today. I kind of expected to go out this morning and find babies on the ground, but no. She probably won't have them for another week. Aaargh!

My friend and fellow goat-owner Ashley took the twins today to de-bud them. That means to apply a red hot iron to their tender little baby heads until the horn buds are totally cauterized. It's a procedure way beyond my comfort zone - unlike doing a vaginal exam on a goat, I guess. Anyway, she brought them back this afternoon looking totally ridiculous with their little shaved heads and silver-painted spots, but they are fine. They are jumping around as though nothing happened. However, she informed me that they have lice. Chicken lice, to be precise.

Ewww. There's nothing on earth grosser than lice, as far as I'm concerned. I carefully inspected them, and it's true. They do have lice. Not the kind that can hop on people, obviously, but lice nonetheless. I didn't check a chicken, so I don't know for sure if they are chicken lice or not. I'm not sure what kind of treatment they need, or how I might treat 30 chickens if they are in fact chicken lice. Got to google that. 

This picture of the pony is just for fun; she doesn't actually have lice, but it looks like she's itchy.

Playing Catchup

I just noticed that it's been several days since I last posted anything. I guess I've been too busy to get to the computer! Let's see....

Iris is still pregnant, although she looks like she's about to pop, the poor thing. She waddles everywhere and I swear she's wider than she is high. Triplets, I think. Flopsy, however.. I still can't say for certain if she's pregnant. If she's not pregnant, then she's damn fat. But there's no evidence of an udder yet, and she ought to be due only days after her mom. Wait and see. Either there will be babies or there won't. 

The grass which I sowed in the back pasture did in fact sprout, and I'm happy to say that I think that pasture will be greatly improved over last year. However, there's still a whole lot of the "bad plant" aka poison hemlock. This afternoon I was talking over the back fence with my neighbor who was out pulling hemlock from her pasture, and I felt compelled to apologize even though it was the previous owners who allowed the hemlock to flourish. I did tell her about my newest find: a cool tool for digging out long-rooted plants like hemlock and burdock. It's a bulb-planter; meant, obviously, for planting bulbs. But it works very well for removing long roots. It's like a shovel, but where the blade of a shovel would be, there's a sharpened tube instead, about three inches in diameter. You can just line it up over the center of a bad plant and step on the crossbar, driving the tube a foot into the ground, then lever the root out and toss it away.  There's far too many hemlock plants to remove them all this way (maybe a thousand?) but I can work on it little by little, and use the gas powered weedeater to prevent seedheads from forming on the ones I can't root out.

I tried to introduce Xana and her babies into the herd. They need to get integrated soon, because Iris is going to give birth any day now and she will need the private space of the mama barn. At first, it seemed to be going well. The other goats checked out the babies perfunctorily, then ignored them and they all grazed peacefully for a couple of hours. Great. I went inside. But when I came back out to check on everybody a couple of hours later, I found a gory scene. Xana had knocked off her scur, most likely in the defense of her babies, and was bleeding fairly profusely from the head. She is also still bleeding from the other end, from kid-birth, so she really presented a grisly picture. She looked like the goat that crawled up from hell. Poor thing. 

On the advice of my vet, who said yeah, it really is kind of an emergency, Rowan and I spent a half an hour attempting to get a pressure bandage on her head. Turns out, that goat is stronger than the two of us put together. After our best efforts, we were panting and liberally streaked with gore, and the goat was thoroughly freaked out, but no bandage had been applied. I did manage to dribble a little iodine on the wound, and I decided to call that good enough, figuring that a goat as feisty as Xana was unlikely to die overnight. And she didn't; she's fine. 

Yesterday was a new record high in eggs: seventeen. That's the benefit of having dispatched the egg-eating hen, I guess. I also collected a pint of milk from Xana. I figure I'll be making my first cheese in about a week. Hooray! 

I brought the baby goats in to Hope's school to show to  her class. I put them in a cardboard box, and as I passed the front desk, I tipped the box towards the secretary  and the various scholastic functionaries to show them the babies. A collective feminine sigh went up and suddenly I was like the pied piper. I was surrounded by a crowd of middle aged ladies as I progressed down the hall to Hope's classroom, where I was enveloped by an equally adoring crowd of kindergartners.

Farming has it's rewards. 

Second Attempt Pronounced a Failure

It didn't work. Although definitely easier to chew than the last time, the meat was bland and tasteless, with a faint but noticeable flavor of barnyard. Even the dogs are unenthusiastic.

I am freezing the broth, because I am just too perverse to throw it all away and let myself be beaten (and once again, the broth is better than the meat by a country mile), but there is no longer any doubt that the mess and the work  involved in killing a chicken are not justified by the results. 

What the heck are we going to do with all our chickens as they get old and stop laying eggs? Does anyone out there have experience with cooking old hens and can you give me any tips?