Brussels Sprouts

I think I’ve written here before about my mother’s cooking. It wasn’t great. In her defense, she was taught cooking by her mother, who learned cooking during the depression. It was better to cook the daylights out of everything than to get food poisoning. This is the only reason I can use to defend my mother’s practice of opening a can of store-purchased green beans and then boiling them for 10 minutes before serving them.

While I like a lot of vegetables, Brussels sprouts never made the cut. My mother would buy them frozen, boil them for a very, very long time, and then serve them to us as “baby cabbages” in an effort to make us like them. I remember them as being mushy, very bitter things.

Recently my niece – a vegetarian – shared something on Facebook about how much she loved Brussels sprouts. I decided to give them another try. At my request, my brother-in-law cooked some as part of our dinner one night on our recent Texas vacation. He heated some olive oil in a pan. He then cut the sprouts in half and cooked them in the pan, lightly tossing them and cooking them just until they started to brown a bit in spots. Then he sprinkled some salt and pepper on them, shredded a bit of parmesan cheese on them, and let them cook just a bit longer to melt the cheese.

They were awesome. They weren’t soggy, they weren’t bitter, and I found myself going back for a second helping. It turns out that I do like Brussels sprouts… just not my mom’s Brussels sprouts.

I’m glad we decided to grow some in this year’s garden, and I’m looking forward to trying to replicate my brother-in-law’s simple recipe with garden-fresh sprouts.

Fishing, Fileting, and Flopper

My girls are really talking the talk when it comes to homesteading. They want to help take care of the animals, and they want to help harvest the animals. It’s to the point that often when we drive by a wooded area my youngest will tell me to “get a gun and go shoot us a deer so we can eat it!”

I recently wrote about how pleasantly surprised I was when we visited some new friends on their small farm and my girls unhesitatingly joined our friend in visiting the goats and other animals, and in getting some eggs from the chickens. I was then pleasantly surprised in how casual they were about trying and eating the goat-meat spaghetti sauce. This past weekend I had another chance to be pleasantly surprised.

We visited my family in Dallas, and on Sunday we decided to go to a local lake and do a bit of fishing. Lili patiently fished for quite a while, and at one point actually got a good bite, but failed to set the hook so she lost the fish before she got it to shore. Eventually some of us did start catching fish though. My brother-in-law, Mack, finally figured out where the fish were and what it took to get them to bite. He caught three rainbow trout, I caught two more, and my wife caught one more.

We eventually headed home with our six (small) rainbow trout. As we headed to the truck, Lili told me that she’d named the largest fish “Flopper.” I was worried. There is an old rule among homesteaders that you don’t allow your children to name the animals you intend to eat because that makes them pets instead of food. I asked Lili, “What are you going to do with Flopper?” She patted her stomach and said, “I’m going to eat him!”

We got back to the house and setup to filet the fish, and Lili told Uncle Mac she wanted to help. It turns out that Uncle Mac is a phenomenal teacher. He showed her exactly how to hold the knife and the fish, how to cut along the backbone, and how to trim the filet so it’s ready to cook. After demonstrating on the first two fish, Uncle Mack helped Lili do the rest, working hand-over-hand.

I was proud of Lili – she was an eager, focused, and respectful learner. She showed zero hesitation in the process from the holding to the cutting, even when it came time to cut Flopper.

Soon they had all six finished and ready to take in for washing. It was time to clean up the guts and remains from the fish. Again, Lili showed zero hesitation, simply picking things up, looking at them, and putting the min the garbage bag. At one point she smiled and posed for a picture, laughing that her mommy would be grossed out by all of the blood and guts.

I was impressed with Uncle Mack’s fishing, teaching, and grilling skills, I was proud of Lili’s patience and focus.

After washing the filets, they were sprinkled with a bit of Old Bay seasoning, allowed to rest in the fridge for an hour, then grilled with the steaks for dinner. It wasn’t much fish for the 7 of us, but it was enough to get a good taste, and end it was enough to completely enjoy the smile on Lili’s face as she tasted the fruit meat of her labor.

After dinner I asked her how it felt to catch, filet, and eat Flopper. She smiled and said, “Flopper was delicious!”

Feeling Barbaric, and OK with That

I had some great conversation this weekend with some friends and family who have a ton of experience in homesteading. They’ve raised egg chickens, meat chickens, and many other animals for meat. They’ve cleared land and gardened. They’ve lived off the land and out in the country. We talked about different ways to kill and clean chickens and rabbits, and the right gun for different needs and applications. And we discussed the proper ways and best tools for cutting down trees to use for heating your house.

And then I looked over at some of our friends and family who were not in the conversation, who haven’t lived the homesteading life and didn’t want to, and I saw looks of disgust and horror on their faces. Evidently our conversation comparing kill methods was barbaric and disgusting. How could we kill an innocent animal like that?

I’ve tried to teach my daughters this obvious but important fact: every time you eat meat, it came from an animal that was once alive and is now dead. Somebody killed that animal, and someone cleaned and butchered that animal. In my case I want to raise the animal ethically and naturally, kill them humanely, clean and butcher them, and cook and eat them. In fact, I have a goal that at some point in the future all of the meat we eat will be either animals we have grown, animals we have hunted, or meat we have purchased from other small, ethical farms near us. It would make me very happy if we could totally disengage from the great American meat production system.

So maybe wanting to kill and eat my own meat animals makes me barbaric, maybe the more civilized thing to do would be to go buy cuts of meat at the store that have been packaged nicely allowing me to pretend it has no connection to a once-living animal. I think it’s natural, but if you or anyone else wants to see me as barbaric, I’m ok with that.

Seeds, Seeds Everywhere

The most popular item grown in American gardens is tomatoes. How many types of tomatoes can you name? If you had asked me that question a week ago I would have listed beefsteak, early girl, roma, and cherry tomatoes. Turns out I was missing a few, like Abu Rawan, Amish Paste, Atkinson, Barsawya, Bison, Bonny Best, and Buckbees. And that’s just the ones that start with A and B.

We recently discovered Baker Creek Seed Company, a seed company committed to natural, organic, heirloom seeds. They sell 52 different types of tomato seeds, and that’s just the red ones. If you include the green, orange, pink, purple, black, brown, striped and bicolor, white, and yellow tomatoes, they sell 211 different types of tomatoes.

They also sell 43 types of sweet pepper seeds, 39 types of hot pepper seeds, and 54 types of watermelon seeds.

I’m way more excited about this than I should be. We’ll be picking up some yellow tomato, white tomato, and green tomato seeds in a couple of days, as well as a new hot pepper and a new sweet pepper variety. And I think I’ll be writing a blog post soon about heirloom versus hybrid versus GMO seeds.

Goat Meat – Take 1

On our visit to the Promised Land this past weekend we got to meet a couple of people my wife had connected with through a homesteading forum. As we were leaving their farm, they gave us a dozen of their fresh farm eggs, a jar of canned rabbit meat, and a pound of frozen ground goat meat. Yesterday I came home to a wonderful dinner of freshly homemade garlic bread, and spaghetti with goat-meat spaghetti sauce. So here are my thoughts on my first time eating goat.

The texture was definitely different from ground beef, chicken, or turkey. It was chewier. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t think anyone trying it would have confused it for ground beef/chicken/turkey on texture alone.

As for taste, it definitely had its own taste. My wife kind of described it as gamey, but I thought it had an unusual sweetness to it. Now spaghetti sauce is something my wife tends to “create” each time instead of following a set recipe, so for all I know she just made a sauce that was a bit sweeter this time, but it all tasted different than usual to me, and definitely sweeter. This one I struggled with a bit more. I think I could get easily get used to it, but, if it was indeed the goat meat adding the sweetness, I think in future cooking experiments I’ll be adding some different seasonings and/or hot sauce or something to offset that sweetness.

I was proud of my girls too, not only because they ate it, but because they ate it without any unnecessary drama or fanfare. It was goat meat, which ultimately in their minds seemed to be just another, new kind of meat and nothing to be dramatic about. Both girls – but my 6-year-old in particular – has talked a lot about all the animals she wants on our farm and all the different meat she’s wanting to try, and to eat. I was proud of her when we visited our new friends’ farm – they have turkey’s, chickens, ducks, goats, and sheep – and my kids were right in there with them and our new friends. And then yesterday, they tried, ate, and finished their goat-meat-spaghetti-sauce with no drama at all. I love those kids. (How many of you get that “kid” joke in the middle of a blog post about goats???)

We were anxious to try the goat because had we all hated it, meat-goats would have been eliminated from the homesteading plans. It looks like we’ll be raising meat-goats.

Visiting the Promised Land

This past weekend we drove to the Missouri Ozarks to look at some land. The Ozarks are our target location for our homestead. I’ve been calling the area the promised land. We love it. It’s beautiful, hilly, and green, with tree-covered hillsides and amazing rock layers along the highways. It’s a great location for us, essentially halfway between our Illinois family and our Dallas family. And the land is relatively inexpensive with very low property taxes.

It’s not the perfect place though, although I’m sure no perfect place exists.

We also got to meet ourselves while we were there. Let me explain.

We live in Illinois, but dream of relocating to the Ozarks. We want to homestead with egg chickens, meat chickens, goats for milk and meat, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits. We want a huge garden, and we want to dehydrate and can a lot of stuff. We met some folks in Missouri that my wife had connected with over an online homesteading forum. They lived in Illinois, but moved to the Ozarks to homestead. They have egg chickens, meat chickens, goats for milk and meat, turkeys, ducks, and rabbits. They have a garden, and they dehydrate and can a lot of stuff. It was like some weird Star Trek episode where we were meeting our future selves. At least I hope it was like that, because these two seemed SO happy with their lifestyle choices, and we really hit it off with them.

It was a great and very productive trip. We not only got to meet our new friends, but we made some huge decisions around property. We went down specifically to look at a couple of pieces of property that we were very interested in. It was literally within a minute of arrive to each of these that we knew these properties were not for us. They were down a very steep hill that I just don’t want to deal with in the winter or the rainy seasons. BUT, a couple of properties that we didn’t think we were going to be interested in, turned out to be extremely intriguing. I’ve emailed the property owner for more information, but we’re very seriously considering making a purchase. I’ll keep you up to date on that.

So for now we’re keeping our fingers crossed that we may have found our new property in the Promised Land. Step by step, inch by inch, we get closer and closer to our dream. Stay tuned…

Memories of Dad

In my last blog post I talked about my Dad raising and killing meat rabbits. That got me to remembering my dad and my childhood.

He was technically my step-father, having married my mother when I was 7 years old. But he was my dad, and he was awesome. He was never afraid of living his life, of trying the new things he wanted to try, in taking chances. I thought that a lot of this stuff was “just dad,” and a little weird when I was growing up. In retrospect it was an awesome part of his personality that really influenced me.

He liked to experiment with food, with making food. In one great experiment he decided to make a bunch of sauerkraut from scratch. He got three massive ceramic crocks, like 3 – 5 gallon crocks. He did all of the steps to the cabbage, then filled the crocks and placed them in the garage to ferment for the required amount of time. I’m not sure what went wrong, but something did. I don’t know if it was too hot, or he left it too long or what, but man did the smell of that rotted cabbage stay around in the garage for ever. It actually put sauerkraut forever on my do-not-eat list of foods.

Then there was the time he decided to make and bottle his own root beer. Everything went fine, and the bottles were placed into the basement to cool. Unfortunately, something went wrong again, which my mom figured out on the 2nd or 3rd loud BANG! from the basement. The root beer was still fermenting even after he had bottled it, and one-by-one, each of the bottles exploded in the basement.

Not all of dad’s experiments went wrong though. He successfully made wine, ketchup, and the rabbit turned out pretty well too. We had a massive garden, and he and my mother regularly canned tomatoes, green beans, and pickles. They also made homemade jelly and unbelievable amounts of apple butter (my parents loved apple butter).

I wish I had paid more attention to my father growing up. I learned a lot from him, but could have learned so much more.

I miss you dad, and thanks for planting some self-sufficiency seeds that took a LONG time to take root.

I’m Thinking of Rabbits

Our homestead planning has included a lot of discussion about animals. The last few days we’ve been talking a lot about rabbits, meat rabbits. My father got some meat rabbits when I was young. He kept them in a hutch in the back yard, and my sister and I helped supervise them as they grew. Finally the big day came. My sister was upset that we were going to kill the rabbits, I was excited and wanted to make sure I could see everything.

My dad and I took the rabbit out of the hutch and put her down on some newspaper. My dad killed her with one quick shot to the back of the head with a lead pipe, then he cut the head off. Next he hung the rabbit upside down on the fence to begin skinning it. I don’t remember much of what happened with the rabbit next, because of what happened with the head. See, I wanted to get a better view of what dad was doing, so I kind of leaned over the head a bit to get a better angle. That’s when the head’s mouth and eyes jerked open. Dad failed to mention to me that rabbits often have residual muscle jerks even after they are dead. Even after the head is off of the body. I was traumatized!

My sister was traumatized later that night. After we had all enjoyed what she thought was a delicious fried-chicken dinner, mom and dad broke the news to her that we’d just had a fried-fluffy dinner!

I don’t remember what rabbit tastes like, but it’s quite a popular meat. So we’ve been talking about the possibility of raising rabbits for meat.

From my research, the pros are many:

• Rabbit meat is healthy – lower calorie and lower fat that most other animals.
• Rabbits reproduce quickly – with two female and one male as a start, you can produce over 100 pounds of rabbit meat in a year.
• Rabbits take less space to raise than other meat animals.
• Skinning a rabbit is faster and easier than plucking a chicken.
• Rabbit poop is excellent for the garden.

I can think of two big cons I’ll have to resolve before rabbits are an option. The first is the processing. For now I still live in a small farming town. I’m not sure that my town would “allow” me to process a bunch of rabbits in town. I’ll need to make sure that I’m good to go on the processing before I go any further.

The second con is the big one. I have two daughters. One is almost 7, and the other is coming up on 5. Rabbits will undoubtedly thrill the girls, being so fuzzy and so cute. I’m concerned that when I go to “harvest the meat,” they’ll look at me the way my sister looked at my dad those many years ago, and man… that look…

Garden 2014 Has Begun

This past weekend we started our first batch of seeds for the 2014 garden.

Before we could start the seeds, I had to get the shelves ready. Last year I build some nice PVC shelves for the seeds. This year we decided to use heating mats for the seedlings. The problem is that the PVC shelves would really support the mats. I ended up having to make a shelf insert for each shelf. I started with some extra pieces of laminate flooring from a recent project, since the flooring is very sturdy, but very lightweight… and it was free and sitting in my garage already.

I cut the laminate to the right size, but was concerned that the girls would bump into it and knock it off if it was just sitting on the PVC shelves, so I glued some wood blocks to the bottom to kind of “lock it in to each shelf. It worked great.

This year we decided to try seed-starting soil pellets. These pellets start out small, about the same size as three quarters stacked up. Then you soak them in warm water for 4 – 5 minutes, and they grow, as shown in the picture to the left.

The pellet instructions said to plant 4 seeds in each pellet. The thinking here is that if you put just one seed in each pellet, you will invariably have a few seeds that just don’t take, and then you’ve wasted a pellet. If you put 4 seeds in each pellet, you’re almost guaranteed to have at least one take in each pellet, and can then thin out any extras if you have multiple seeds take.

We opted to plant 3 seeds in each of these pellets, and then covered it all loosely with just a bit of fertilized seed starting mix.

I’m not convinced that these pellets are necessary. I’m not even convinced that they’re any better than just using seed-starting mix, but my 6-year old daughter loved being in charge of soaking them for us.

The seeds are all comfy now in their well-watered pellets, sitting on top of our seed-heating mats, under the lights. We started 50 pellets today, and will start 50 more next weekend to stagger the harvest a bit.

Here is what we planted in this first set:

• 3 pellets of Jalapeno Peppers
• 3 pellets of Yellow Peppers
• 4 pellets of Green Peppers
• 10 pellets of Amish Paste Tomatoes
• 10 pellets of Homestead Tomatoes
• 10 pellets of VR Moscow Tomatoes

We’ll keep them well watered, using some powdered milk in the water for the tomatoes to give them a boost of calcium as they start to take root.

Here’s hoping we all have gardening success in 2014!

Specializing in General Things

In 1958 economist Leonard E. Read wrote what is now a famous economic document in which he pointed out that, “… not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make [a pencil].” There are people who know how to do each discrete step – find the trees, cut down the trees, load and haul the trees to the mill, mill the wood, find the graphite, extract the graphite, process the graphite, shape the graphite, shape the wood, “build” the pencil, mix the paint, paint the wood, process the metal, mix the eraser materials, make the eraser, etc.

This is all an example of the economic principle of specialization. Instead of each of us hunting, butchering, and cooking our own meat, planting, harvesting and processing our own fruits and vegetables, and building, wiring, plumbing, and heating our own homes, we specialize. I provide a very specific service for someone who pays me money. You do the same. We then use that money to purchase very specific products and services from someone else.

I was in a sales seminar years ago and the speaker was speaking on how focused he is on knowing his product and his business. At one point he said, “If I have a plumbing problem, I call a plumber. If I have a doorknob problem, I call a doorknob guy.” This was specialization taken to the extreme.

A byproduct of an economy so based on specialization is that we (I) tend to become perfectionists. If I am going to learn about something new – say raising chickens, or building a shed – I want to study and research for hundreds of hours, I want to learn everything I can about it, I want to produce work that is comparable to what I could pay a “professional” to do.

Both specialization, and the counter-perfectionism go against the grain of homesteading. In homesteading the goal is to know enough about the things you need to do. I don’t need to know everything there is to know in shed building, I just need to know how to build one shed, the exact style and plans of my shed, and do it in a way that will produce a sufficient quality.

Now I realize saying something like “I don’t need it to be perfect, I just need it to be good enough,” sounds lazy, like I’m going to lower my standards to accept some random nailing of boards and call it a shed. No. I’m saying I need to be able to produce one that is “good enough.” It doesn’t have to be perfect. I don’t have to know everything there is about shed building. I don’t need to know how to make 3 different foundation options and 4 different roof structures, just one of each.

I’m planning to put in a small orchard and a large garden. I’m planning to build a shed, a chicken coop, a barn, and a house. Gardening is the only one of these I already know how to do. I won’t do every single step of the other projects myself. I’ll hire someone to excavate and pour the basement/foundation, because that is work (in my opinion and for me) that is better left to the specialists. I’ll hire other specialists along the way where I truly do need their expertise and/or their ability to work much faster than I can. I’m confident that – with friends, books, forums, articles, blogs, and YouTube as my teachers – I’m a good enough student to learn these things “good enough.”

I’m looking forward to the challenge, the experience, and the satisfaction.