Fish (guts) 'N Chips

Paul went fishing yesterday and brought home a nice sized catfish!

He doesn’t get on the lake or river very often, so it’s a treat when he comes home with supper in the cooler.

Catfish nuggets...

                                                 

                                                        And what's left of the chips (fries).

We’re fortunate to have the lake and river just a short drive (or even a walk) away, not only for cooling off in the summer heat, but for a source of fresh fish. The water is one of the reasons we moved here.

So, do you have any ponds, lakes or rivers near you that you can utilize as both recreation and a food source?  Don’t overlook your local park districts and state parks; just make sure that the water isn’t polluted to the point that you’d be putting icky fish on your dinner plates. 

Even if you’re not lucky enough to have real SEA-food (you know….shrimp, scallops, lobster, $$$) there are plenty of other delicious fresh water fish.  My two favorites are Walleye and Catfish, although I wouldn’t turn away a plate full of battered and fried panfish like Bluegill or Sunfish.

Now that I have your mouth watering, let’s talk fish guts!

If you’re even the most novice of novice, gardeners, I’m sure you’ve at least heard of fish emulsion.  So what better use of a container of fresh fish skin, bones and guts than to make some homemade fish emulsion for our garden?

I read somewhere online that it’s as simple as taking a 5-gallon bucket, filling it half-way with vegetable material, sawdust or leaves, 2 tablespoons of Epsom Salt and the fish guts.  Finish filling the bucket ¾ of the way with water & leave it out in the sun.  Stir once a day for two weeks and voilà – Fish Emulsion!

So now I’m off to find a suitable (i.e. not cracked) 5-gallon bucket (and a place where the cats, dogs, chickens, opossums, raccoons, etc. won't get to it) and start our homemade kick-butt fertilizer. 

Heavenly Halitosis

Another oven-less day!  Made a huge salad yesterday and topped it off with chunks of garlic-seasoned chicken breast and homemade garlic & onion salad dressing.  Side of huge croutons (made from the herb bread cooked in the grill) and a glass of sweet tea and call it a Supper!

I’ve been lazy lately (let’s face it, I’ve always been kind’a lazy) and our salads have been topped with…….store-bought dressing!  Oh, the horror!

I know, I know!  What kind of homesteading-wanna-be am I that I purchase that crummy mass-produced, frankenfood dressing at the supermarket??  Well I’m glad to say that I no longer have any bottled salad dressing in the house and will be (hopefully) making my own dressings from now on.

Not only is it like waaaaaayyyy cheaper - and better tasting - but you can mess with it until it’s to your liking!  I suppose the real drawback is that it doesn’t keep for more than a few days.  But then again, that’s usually the drawback for any type of homemade foodstuff.

We are garlic and onion lovers here at Krazo Acres.  I have the morning Dragon Breath to prove it.  I just feel sorry for little Rhiannon because she’s also taken a liking to garlic and onions……who wants to kiss a baby-powdered, soft-skinned, cutie-pie toddler with garlic breath??  Double time on the teeth brushing!

Here’s the recipe if you wann’a try it:

1 cup Mayonnaise (Click HERE for homemade recipe)
½ cup Sour Cream (or Greek-style yogurt….which is basically really thick yogurt)
1 Tbsp. White Vinegar
1 Tbsp. Sugar
1 Small Onion, chopped
½ tsp. Salt
1 Clove Garlic, minced or through garlic press (or ½ tsp. garlic powder)
1 Tbsp. Chives (or parsley, gives it nice green specks of color)
Milk – Optional, to make it thinner

Chuck all of the above into blender, zip until onions are chopped up fine.  Chill in fridge before using.

Moth Buddy

It was an insect-filled morning......

There was a Luna moth by the front door.

And I found a teeny-tiny praying mantis on the grill (which I carefully relocated to the safety of my pea trellis before turning on the burners).  I tried to get a picture of her, but she was just so tiny that the camera wouldn’t focus properly.

And then, my nemesis, the Bald Faced Hornet!

Which was no match against me and my cat-like reflexes.  Actually, it was more like me cussing, jumping up and down, pivoting and dodging while flailing the swatter around in all directions.

I was hoping that this was a queen since it was so much larger than the other ones I’ve been seeing, but knowing my luck, it probably wasn’t.

Last year I was at war with the bald-faced-buggers.  Every time I went into the barn to milk, they would be there, relentlessly dive-bombing my head.  I’m assuming they frequented the barn not only to torment me, but to take advantage of the flies buzzing around the barn.  It was actually kind of interesting to see them hunting flies midair….although not interesting enough for me to stop trying to crush their exoskeleton and splatter their guts any chance I got.  At one point mid-summer, I would have to milk the goats one-handed as I had to keep a swatter in the other hand. 

After killing dozens of them, I decided that I had to tackle the problem at the source.  And that meant trompsing through the tick and chigger infested tangle of wood to find the nest.  But I didn’t find it, and before the winter and the insect-killing frosts came to the woods, I received no fewer than five stings. 

When Paul was dozing down some of the Evil, I mean, Enchanted Forest earlier this spring I noticed something hanging in the trees just where he had stopped.  And guess what it was?

The nest!  It was a bitter sweet find though.  As much as I was happy to have finally found the nest, it was empty as the workers die in the winter and the queen (that bitch) finds a comfy little pile of leaves or dirt to hide in and hibernate until the following spring

I’ve only been visited by two, maybe three bald faced hornets so far this year, but I’m sure as the summer months drag on their numbers will increase.  Hopefully I’ll be able to find the nest before I receive too many stings this year.

Cooking Outside

Yesterday was the first official day of cooking without using my oven or range.  Since it’s been like a million degrees outside and the house is only slightly cooler, I figured it was better to discontinue using the oven and range.

We had steaks, canned corn, sautéed onions & mushrooms and flatbread for Supper.
The flatbread is basically just an herbed white bread dough, rolled out thin.  I generously brushed olive oil on the sides that were on the grill, brushed some more oil on the top and sprinkled some parmesan cheese on it right before I took it out of the grill.  Next time I’ll slice some zucchini, onions and tomatoes really thin and put them on top of the flatbread while they’re grilling. 

The white blobs on the grill are the flatbread.

Having a side-burner is a great help when cooking on the grill.

After the steaks were done (in like forty-five seconds.....I like my steak to “Moo”), I kept the burners on low / medium on one side of the grill to keep the temps around 400 degrees, flipped an old cake pan upside down on the non-burner side, then placed my loaf of bread (half of the flatbread recipe, but left to rise) on top of the cake pan.  

I’m happy to say that I will still be able to bake bread without turning on the stove inside! 

We almost finished off an entire jar of pears for dessert; another no-heat option.  These were the pears that one of Paul’s co-workers gave us last year and I canned them up.  They were DE-licious!

Now I have to think of what to make tonight!

PS – Susan, would you please email me your “secret” fix so I can post comments again?  Thanks!  CarolynRenee@centurytel.net

Does it get this hot in Africa?

Really.  Does it? 

We’ve had some near 100 degree temperatures and that was just the first week of June.  We went right from Soggy Spring to Scorching Summer in like three weeks.

I’ve been meaning to clean out the kidding pen and chicken coop, but I just can’t manage to get up the courage to do it just yet.  I’m hoping that we’ll get some sort of break from the heat this week and I’ll get them cleaned out then.  I just can’t bear the thought of not only sweating like a pig in the 95 degree heat, but having all that chicken litter dust sticking to my sweat covered self and eventually dripping down into parts unmentionable.  Needed that visual, didn’t ya?  Sorry.

I suppose I could have done it early morning Sunday (when it was only 75 degrees), but we really needed to disbud Cloud’s doeling and it seemed better to do it that morning since it was cooler.  Everything went well and I was finally able to put the disbudding box and iron away for the season.  So the chicken coop and kidding pen remain un-cleaned.

We also said farewell to one of Annette’s kids.  Annette is still saying “goodbye” (imagine constant goat-bleating in the background, even with the doors and windows closed up). 

Her little buckling went to his new home to become a future herd sire.  What a sweet job, hugh?

This heat has also been making cooking anything inside almost unbearable.  We had defrosted one of the chickens several days ago and it really needed to be cooked, but I didn’t want to turn the oven on for an hour & a half. 

Smoker to the rescue!

Paul seasoned the bird, started a fire in the smoker and smoked the chicken for several hours.  We munched on right-outa-the-smoker chicken (before I could even get a picture of the whole bird) and had cold chicken the next day for lunch. 

I’m trying to plan meals that require little or no cooking indoors.  I have the grill and smoker at my disposal.  We just got beef from one of Paul’s co-workers last week so I defrosted a few t-bones (hey, who needs a holiday excuse to eat a fancy-pants cut of steak??) and a pack of burger for Sloppy Joes.  Throw in a few huge mixed salads with grilled chicken on top, some sort of pasta, pizza on the grill one night and I’ve got a week’s worth of suppers! 

I may even try baking a loaf of bread inside the grill.  Anyone ever try that?

PS – Still not ignoring y’all, I can comment on some blog pages, but not mine. :*(

Oh no! WE'RE the bad neighbors!

While I was sitting at the computer typing my blog for today (which will now be posted tomorrow), the phone rang.  It seems that Moonshine, the wonder-beagle-mutt, has been wandering around lately and was hanging out at the neighbor’s house about a mile up the road.  I wasn’t’ sure why she’d go all the way up there (being old, short-legged and quite pudgy) until I realized that they have been hosting some picnics the past few weekends and it seems that she’s been giving the sad-doggie-eyes to any and everyone that had food.
 

So I drove up there to apologize and opened the car door to a less-than-enthusiastic mutt. They said it wasn’t a problem and that the younger daughter was enjoying the visits, but I still feel badly about it.  I’m one of those anal people who think that their animals should stay on their own property.  Although I will admit that our next door neighbor’s dogs visit our place and I really don’t mind.  But generally speaking, I think your animals belong on your property, not wandering around. 

Then on the drive back, I saw Harley by the other neighbor’s driveway (they weren’t home).  Harley has been following the car when we leave.  At first, he would stop at our next door neighbor’s house and visit with their dogs.  Now he’s wandering a bit farther to the second and third homes and I’m afraid that his travels will continue until he eventually follows us all the way up to the mule barn.  Which wouldn’t be too bad except the mule barn is awfully close to a busy road.  Not interstate kind’a busy, but still busy enough that I’d be worried.

Harley will follow us back when he sees the car go back towards the house, which is good, but I’m not sure how we’re going to get him to “Go Home” when we tell him to instead of following the car.

No, we don’t have our place fenced in except for the goats (and don’t plan on it in the near future).  No, we can’t keep Harley chained up.  I suppose I’m now just one of those kind of dog owners. Guess I’ll be checking out some dog training books from the library.  Any ideas?

Something's Better than Nuth'n

Paul scraped another garden area for me a few days ago and planted the remaining squash and tomatoes I started from seed. 

Rhiannon and I also dug in a row of black oil sunflower seeds just for the heak of it and they’ve already started to push through the dirt, in like three days!  Talk about almost-instant gratification! 

Rhiannon's "Dump a Bunch" method of seed sowing.  Think I'll need to thin 'em??

Not exactly sure what I’m going to do with the sunflowers as I’m pretty much certain the birds, deer, squirrels, raccoons (and with my luck, even the darned snakes) will be snacking on them before I can harvest any seeds.

Even though I had high hopes of having a large garden this year with plenty to can for the pantry, my ambitions weren’t quite matched by my actions and the garden doesn’t consist of much.  I also lost all twelve eggplants, twelve cabbage and about ten tomato plants due to the swamp-like conditions we had last month from all the stinking rain.  I suppose that means we’ll have a drought next month.  It’s too late to start tomatoes and peppers from seed and too hot to plant lettuce or spinach.  So I’m going to cheat; I’m going to buy some plants from the local nursery.

I don’t expect to find many varieties; probably the old standbys like California Wonder Peppers, Big / Better Boy Tomatoes and other hybrid vegetables.  Even though I’m probably going to end up paying close to $2 for a small six-pack cell of plants, I figure I’ll still be way ahead as opposed to buying stuff from the super market.

So if you had a bad start (or no start at all) on your seedlings this winter or didn’t have time to sow seeds directly in the ground (or the dog ran over your squash plants, the green worms ate your turnips down to nubs, the toddler pulled up half your peas while helping you weed), don’t give up!  Go to your local nursery or Big Box home improvement center and buy yourself a flat of vegetables.  If you didn’t manage to get that garden tilled under or fenced in, try planting them in containers.  Put them around the front porch where they will be easy to water.  Just plant SOMETHING!

Unless you really do like those high-priced, tasteless, pesticide-laden tomatoes at the Wal-Mart Supercenter.

Oh, by the way, I’m not ignoring your comments…..stupid blogger isn’t letting me comment again.  Anyone know if it's something fixable or do I have to wait for the blogger-gods to fix it?