Something happy

I think we all need something happy right now. This is all I could think of. Hope it makes you smile.

25 weeks

Flying the coop

They've escaped!

Yes, I know my yard is a mess. Right now my house is much worse. Don't judge.

It only took a week for the ladies to figure out that they can use the new compost bin to get over the fence and into the yard. I found 4 of the 6 out in the yard. I opened the gate to the chicken yard for the rest of the girls. Luckily, they found their way back at dusk.

The medicinal properties of olive oil

The chickens would like to tell you good morning.  

Also, did you bring them any treats? Hubs and I had a very busy weekend. Friday I got off work at noon, and we set to work in the yard. We needed to replant some grass and clover in the chicken run where weeds had killed everything off last summer. Unfortunately, we don't have great soil, so we needed to loosen everything up with a pitch fork before spreading the seed. From there I set to work transplanting my peas, pumpkins, zucchini, and squash from my seed starter tray into bigger pots, and starting another round of peppers along with some herbs and flowers. I also added some pansies to the strawberry bed out front next to our walkway. I figured it was too early for pansies, but I don't care. I want some color darn it! Then we set to the daunting task of emptying 6 months of chicken shit out of the coop. It's really not that dirty of a job, but it does involve using a pitchfork to scoop out all of the straw and poop. Halfway through I realised that there was no way that much muck would fit in our compost bin. In the fall, I put the waste directly onto the garden. It has all winter to break down. Chicken poop is good firtilizer, but it's high in nitrogen and will burn the plants if you don't give it time to break down. So we scrambled and built a new compost bin out of some pallets we had in the garage. When we finished, we were so exhausted, I'm ashamed to admit, we had Panda Express for dinner. Don't tell my midwife. After all that work on Friday, Saturday was supposed to be relaxing! We had a lot of sticks in the yard along with the plants from the vegetable garden that I never dealt with last year. We were going to have a relaxing day sitting around the chiminea burning. Yeah right. We let the chickens out into the back yard to forage and to "till" the garden. After about an hour I noticed one of the girls trying to take a nap with her feathers all puffed up and her rear end sticking high in the air. I watched her closely all day, but she never snapped out of it. I thought maybe she was egg bound (had an egg stuck in her duct that she could not pass) but try as I might I could not feel and egg stuck inside her. She happily ate the clementine segment I shared with her, but was only taking a little water and had not pooped at all. This is very unusual for a chicken. They poop all the time! I was very worried that we were going to lose her. Finally I remembered a post I had read from HenCam describing about a treatment for egg bound chickens that helps with other ailments as well. This is from the amazing author who wrote the children's book Tillie Lays an Egg. Just as we decided to run to the drugstore to get the supplies we would need to treat our girl, it started to pour and effectively put out our fire for the day. Once back from the store the little lady was dosed with 2 teaspoons of olive oil, which she swallowed, but was NOT happy about having an eyedropper shoved in her beak. Then was given the spa treatment of a soak in warm water and Epsom salts.

I kept her in a box next to me on the couch while I waited for her feathers to dry. She ate the food I brought her, drank some water, and finally pooped! TWICE!

If I'm this excited about chicken poop, you guys won't be able to stand me once this baby is born!

She curled up in her box and napped while I wrote some emails and surfed the web. I never thought I'd be one of those people that brings their chickens into the house, but she was freaking adorable napping next to me on the couch! Then, when her feathers were dry, we put her out with her sisters. She had perked up quite a bit by then and was running around the yard with them enjoying the last hour before sunset and chicky bedtime.

Today when I came out into the yard, all 6 girls were perky and pecking around for bugs. I was such a happy chicken mom!

Things I planted this weekend:
Carrots
Kale
Chard
Lettuce
Spinach
Dill
Parsley
Basil
Sweet Basil
Lemon Basil
Cilantro
Red Bell Peppers
Nasturtium
Purple Coneflower

Chocolate Granola

Happy Autism Awareness week!

Today is gorgeous! I'm sitting outside watching my chickens eat as much green grass as they can handle. They are so happy to be out of the chicken yard and in the garden. It's a great time of year to let them into the garden. They'll eat up all the grubs and larva that will grow into bigger pests later.

Okay, so homemade granola. One, it's easy. Two, it's delicious. Three, it's healthy (mostly).

This recipe is easily adapted for any amount you want to make. The amounts I have below are based off of the amount of ingredients that will fit on one of my baking sheets. If you want to make more or less, just eyeball the amounts that look good to you as you add them to the pan. Also, all of my measurements that are in ounces are just approximations from the bag size. I can get about 3 batches out of one 12 ounce bag of chocolate chips, so I use about 4 ounces.

Preheat your oven to 350.

Pour 2 cups of steel cut oats out onto your baking sheet, and give it a shake to spread them evenly around the pan.

Next, add a cup of nuts. I used raw peanuts because they were on sale. Also, I love peanuts. I frequently use raw almonds in this recipe, and you can use whatever nut you want.

And if you want to add some seeds you can do that now as well. I added 1/2 cup of sunflower seeds I needed to use up.

This goes into the oven for 20 minutes, taking time to pull it out and stir it half way through. The oats around the edge of the pan will get too dark if you don't stir, so use a rubber spatula to pull the oats from the outside to the inside and give it another shake to even everything back out.

Everyone's a sous chef.
After 20 minutes I add my fruit. You can use any dried fruit you like. In this batch I used 3.5 ounces of dried coconut...

...and 1 cup of raisins.

Put the granola back into the oven for 5 to 8 minutes. If you are using coconut, keep a close eye on it. Lightly browned, toasted coconut is delicious, but it goes from brown to black very quickly.

Gorgeous
Lastly, after you pull the pan out of the oven, add about 4 ounces of chocolate chips. Sprinkle them all over the granola. The heat from the granola will melt them as you mix. I use my rubber spatula to press the granola into the chocolate so that everything gets an even coat.

Chocolate just starting to combine

Chocolate mostly worked in

Chocolate completely coating the granola and spread out on the pan to cool
Before you scoop the granola off the pan, it needs to cool so that the chocolate can harden. I usually just leave mine out on the counter for a few hours, but you can put it in the fridge.

Once everything has cooled, you can scoop your granola into an airtight container for storage. Use your hands to break up any chunks that look too big for a spoon.

This granola, in a cereal bowl, with some whole milk is one of my favorite snacks. We would eat it for breakfast every day before we had chickens. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Grapefruit sex

The weather was so nice today, Sirius and I had to take an extra long walk. Keep it coming Mother Nature, keep it coming!

In honor of our nice weather, have some bonus pictures.

This is my mini grapefruit tree. I think if I planted it outside, and lived in Hawaii, it would be a full size tree. But it's small because it's in a pot in my living room. This is the first year that it has flowered. I'm excited to have my own fresh grapefruit in a few months. But you know where babies come from. I've been using a Q tip the past few mornings to spread the love from flower to flower. My living room smells amazing!

We also brought home a gerber daisy from the grocery store this weekend. We should have some flowering bulbs by now, but it's just been too cold. So I brought home some flowers for the inside. Husband wasn't thrilled that it was orange (go Knights!) but it was the only color they had.

Albus thinks it's pretty though!

Egg roll experiment

When I started posting recipes on this blog, I decided I didn't just want to post recipes that were perfect, that I had made four or five times and finished (If you can ever consider a recipe finished). I want you to see that it's okay to start with an idea, and have it be okay, or even bad. And that's not the end of the world. We see chefs on TV that tell us this is the exact way to make a dish. They don't show you the time they put into each recipe. They don't talk about how it's their job to come up with new recipes, and they don't have to scramble to put dinner on the table after working until 7pm. They don't show you the two other variations on their technique that would also taste great. I want this blog to show that it's okay to experiment and make mistakes because we are almost never exposed to that in food media. You cannot be a home cook if you're afraid to make mistakes. And we know that cooking from scratch at home is better for your health than eating out or buying processed foods.

I have never made egg rolls before, but it seemed like an interesting vehicle for leftovers. We had a leftover pork roast that needed used up, so I decided to give it a try. These are pork, sweet potato, and onion egg rolls with dijon dipping sauce. They are not Asian themed egg rolls, this was just a means to use up my leftover pork roast and one, lonely sweet potato.

Since I had a huge chunk of roasted pork shoulder left, and I HATE shredding meat, I decided to see if all the hype on Pinterest about shredding your meat in your stand mixer is true. My response with pork is, sort of.

First, you have to remove the bone. :) Also, it did not work with a piece of meat this size. I had to cut it up into two inch chunks. After cutting it into smaller pieces, the mixer did break the meat down. Some of it was shredded, and some of it was, well, mashed. I was not impressed. Maybe it's a better technique for chicken.

I almost never peel vegetables, and this was no exception. I gave my sweet potato a good scrub and cut it into thirds. I then cut it into planks, and cut the planks into match sticks. One of my main concerns was that the egg roll wrappers would finish baking and the sweet potatoes would still be raw.

I then cut 1/4 of an onion into match sticks.

Then, covered the veg in olive oil, salt and pepper, using my hands to toss everything and make sure it was all coated.

For Christmas I was given new baking sheets! They are aluminum. I don't use teflon. I don't like cancer. So I gave these a coating of olive oil as well to help the egg rolls not stick.

To assemble, I placed one wrapper at a time on my cutting board, point towards me.

I added about 1 1/2 tablespoons of pork, and enough veg to cover the pork.

Then I rolled them thusly.

After rolling, place the egg roll on the baking sheet seam side down.

You can see here where I tried to tuck the corners too tightly and ripped the wrapper. This happened several times. I tried to just wrap the top over the holes.

I filled all 15 wrappers in the package. The last two were a little overstuffed, but I used up all of the potatoes and onions. ;)

I had a hard time deciding at what temperature to bake them. I found recipes ranging from 350 to 450. I decided to settle on 375, hoping that the sweet potatoes would bake at that temperature. I also debated whether or not I should have brushed the tops of the egg rolls with oil. The bottoms would get browned from the oil on the pan, but I wasn't sure about the tops. I decided not to.

I baked them at 375 for 10 minutes, flipped them over, and baked for another 10 minutes.

smashing garlic with my knife
For the sauce I combined 3 ounces of Greek yogurt with 2 tablespoons of dijon, a clove of garlic that I minced, then smashed with my knife and a pinch of salt (the course salt helps break down the garlic), another half teaspoon of salt, and some black pepper.

First the bad news. When I flipped the egg rolls after the first 10 minutes in the oven, most of them were stuck to the baking sheet in spite of my layer of oil. I'm not sure how to fix this problem, except to not use aluminum pans. I didn't love the texture of the meat. This was probably more of a problem with the stand mixer's shredding than with the pork roast itself. I guess next time I'm back to using a fork and my fingers. Sigh. And finally, the texture of the wrapper wasn't the best. The first side down was very crispy except for where it had ripped when then stuck to the pan. But the second side wasn't as crisp. I could either brush the tops with oil next time as I had considered, or FRY THEM!

The good news was that vegetables were delicious and the sweet potatoes were fully cooked! None of the holes I made in the wrappers made any difference with the finished product. And the dipping sauce was delish. I'd say I enjoyed the sauce more than the egg rolls themselves.

This was far from my favorite meal, but I'm glad I made it. I'm closer now to being able to make a delicious egg roll than I was before I tried. And the assembly process was simple enough that I'm motivated to try again.

Babies

Spring is here! I refuse to have any more negative thoughts about the weather. It is spring! Green things are happening. The chickens were spotted yesterday scratching in the dirt for live things to eat for lunch.

Broccoli sprouts in the morning sunlight.
It's been just over a week since I started my indoor vegetables, and look at everything that's come up!

Peas!
I was out of pea seeds, so I picked up the packet of sugar snap peas for $0.20 at Walmart. I didn't expect them to do well, but almost every pea of the over 20 that I planted has sprouted!

Tomato row.
These tomatoes are all from seeds that I saved last year and back in 2010 before we moved. Almost every single one has sprouted. I'm so proud.

My favorite baby crop is the broccoli seedlings. They come up such a pretty shade of green with dew drops clinging to their little heart shaped leaves. They scream spring!

It's so much easier to keep my spirits high when I've got seedlings to check on every morning. A little bit of green always makes me feel better.

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone!