Wahsega Valley Farm

Cauliflower "rice" and zucchini "pasta"

Here are a couple of fun things to make if you've stopped eating grains or just want a chance of pace.

Since I've given up grains, that rules out rice and pasta - and yeah, even the gluten-free kind. I didn't eat much of either anyway, so it wasn't a big sacrifice for me to give them up. But there are always times when I'd like to put a nice curry dish on top of some rice or have tomato sauce over spaghetti. The paleo people have come up with of a bunch of cool alternatives for the foods we used to eat and cauliflower rice and zucchini pasta are two of them.

Here is a picture of the cauliflower rice before I cook it:

To turn cauliflower into "rice", you just cut it up and toss it into a food processor and let it go until the pieces are about the size of rice. You don't want mush, so don't be overzealous. Then, I usually just stir fry it with some onions, garlic and mushrooms, and add a little Bragg's Liquid Aminos for extra flavor. I can eat it plain (it's good!) or use it as I would rice. It's nice with stir-fries or any recipe that has a sauce. It's versatile, just like rice is - and is quick to make. 

Then, there is zucchini pasta:

I like it a lot. Mike said he would have liked the spaghetti better the other night if I hadn't told him it was made with zucchini noodles. But he's never been a big fan of spaghetti anyway, so... mox nix. For me, it's guilt-free eating and doesn't bloat me up and spike my blood sugar levels like grain-based pasta. And, depending on how much you cook it, the noodles can be firm and crispy or soft and noodle-y. You can cook them in the microwave, in the oven, steam 'em or on the stove top.

To turn summer squash into noodles, you can use a mandolin - which I would have used if mine wasn't packed up with 95% of our belongings that wouldn't fit into this tiny cabin - or you could use a julienne peeler like I did. Mine is Kuhn Riko brand, but there are several out there. You just peel the length of the zucchini, stopping when you hit the seeds. (I feed the zucchini scraps to my chickens after I put them in the food processor to make them bite-sized.) You end up with what you see in the bowl above; they hadn't been cooked yet.

So, there you have it - two foods to help those who are trying to kick grains or for those who just want to try something different. 

Veggie garden structures for support

This might be boring for you non-gardeners, but I want to put in one place the garden structures we're using this year in our vegetable garden. These can be taken down and used again and again and they are super strong and support all the veggies well. 

For the tomatoes and cucumbers, we're using trellises like last year.

Cucumbers:

Tomatoes:

For the beans (I know this is a repeat), we decided a tunnel would be nice so I can walk underneath the beans as they vine up and over. Last year the structure was like the trellises above and not easy to get underneath to gather the beans that hung on the inside. 

And, to keep the deer away from the sweet potatoes, Mike got some wire mesh (like what was used for the trellises above) and some metal poles and just "sliced" the pole to hold the mesh wire. It's kinda hard to see, but the mesh sections fit into the poles and everything can be adjusted or enlarged very easily (as the plants spread out and grow). Maybe the sweet potatoes will have a chance this year!

Close-up of one corner:

And, speaking of chances, I'm doing a quadruple whammy attack on the squash bugs, vine borers and cucumber beetles this year with my zucchini.

I'm surrounding them with marigolds, spraying them with neem, dusting them with DE and check out the aluminum foil mulch. The brightness of it is supposed to confuse the vine borer moth from depositing her eggs at the root of the plant and also make it harder to get to. It looks a little crazy, but I'm willing to howl at the moon if it helps. 

Veggie Garden

I've had a couple of requests to see my veggie garden, so thought I'd post a few pictures of it from yesterday. It's just starting out so isn't too exciting yet. I've already found two squash bugs and several cucumber beetles, but I've got a plan this year and have already begun spraying with neem and dusting with DE. With my zucchini I've even mulched it with aluminum foil! Sounds weird, but some say it helps keep the vine borers from getting a foothold (the moths get confused by the shiny foil and can't get to the stalk to lay eggs as well). We'll see how it goes. I'm also planting marigolds here and there and if they don't scare off the bugs with their scent, they at least look pretty, right?

But enough jabbering for now; here are some pictures. This is shot from behind the chicken coop and shows the whole garden area. The bushy plant at the right bottom of the garden is a huge lemon balm I planted last year. Today I planted four types of mint near it 'cause I love mint tea (mixed with a little lemon balm). 

Here are about half my tomatoes - a few temporarily staked until Mike can help me build the trellis this weekend like we had last year. These were all from seed and did great. My peppers were a big fail this year though for some reason and I had to buy most of them.

Here is macho Dusty with the sun-setting light shining. He must have seen Sophie and was on his way to wrestle with her.

Here is one of the bean tunnels Mike designed for me and we put up last weekend. We're putting up two of them. It is easily taken apart to be used again and again. It will be so cool when the beans are growing all over it and it really becomes a tunnel. I love it. The beans should be poking up real soon.

Here are my baby sweet potatoes. I'm covering them every night to keep the deer away, but might devise a low fence/wire thingie that covers the whole area. I'm sure Mike will come up with a stellar idea.

And here is my garden buddy, Sophie. She's so nice and quiet and calm while Dusty is such a goober. He runs all over the place, pees where I just planted a veggie, keeps getting in my lap and cries a funny kind of wail when he gets bored and wants me to go back up to the cabin. Is that the difference between men and women? Ha! Naw, just kidding.

And, for the cat people, here are the two of them "dancing".

 
I've just about finished planting but have some weed clean-up to take care of around the edge of the garden and then can shift into maintenance... and stay on top of the pest problems. I'm going to get them this year before they unpack their little suitcases and move in.

Oh yeah, I started a little herb garden behind the cabin and will take pictures of that soon and post.

How to turn eggshells into calcium powder

This might be something that most people don't have any interest in doing, but I know of at least one person who does! Not that she couldn't have figured it out on her own, of course.

Turning eggshells into calcium powder is just one way I compost all the eggshells I get from my chickens. You can put the powder in your garden, in your pets or even in you (probably should boil the eggshells first in that case though). For information on the nutrients eggshells provide and more, check here.

When I use eggs, I drop the eggshells into a bowl so I can rinse out the eggwhite that might still be clinging to the wall of the shell. I don't remove the membrane though because it contains nutrients as well. After rinsing, I dry them like this:

I know; not very high-tech, huh? Some people dry them in their oven or maybe even in their dehydrator, but by the time I use more eggs, the drying shells are bone dry and I just replace them with the new, wet eggshells. Works for me. And it's quiet. 

Once dry, I put them in a freezer type bag. The plastic has to be kind of thick because the shells have sharp edges and can poke through thinner bags.

Then I use my mother's old rolling pen to flatten the eggshells. It's kinda fun. Yeah, I guess I'm a child. 

They're smashed pretty well here.

I use an ancient coffee grinder (that has remnants of ground flax seeds here, I see) to grind the shells into powder. You can also use a blender or food processor, but this works fine for me since I do small batches at a time. 

Here is the powder after a very short time.

And in a bowl so it can be seen better.

That was eight eggshells. I think it rule of thumb is that one eggshell equals about one teaspoon. Sounds about right. 

Now I can sprinkle it around my tomato plants and any other veggie that needs a little calcium boost. Cool, huh?

Weed smorgasbord

Earlier this spring when I was pulling the weeds that were taking over our garden area due to our very early wet and warm weather, I'd give them to the chickens. If you know anything about chickens, you know they eat most anything green they can get to, so their run looks like a barren dessert. I give them a midday snack of lettuce and cabbage and other things every day since they can't be free range here and I think they need some "greens". But the weeds were a nice change of pace and the went crazy over them as you can see. I picked them in the morning right when they were all dewy fresh and green.

You can see Clyde making sure all is well and that his girls are all getting their share. He's a good rooster (other than being way too amorous).

They picked all the leaves off the weed vines and had a ball doing it. Soon they'll have lots of tomatoes to eat; they looove tomatoes.

Here is my best chicken buddy, Flapper, running up to me hoping to jump in my lap when I crouched down to take a picture. She's a lap chicken for sure.

Today's eggs

Here are the eggs I brought in today from my chicken girlfriends. They're in my special egg basket that I've had a long time - way before I ever had chickens or thought I'd ever have the opportunity to have chickens. It's thick so is kinda padded, making it perfect for egg gathering. There are 13 in the basket and we get that many every day! We give some away, eat some and scramble them up for the chickens who loooove them. 

With all the eggshells I have I've started drying them and then grinding them up for calcium for my garden and even the chickens. And sometimes if I'm lazy I just toss them into the compost pile. 

I love my chickens like pets, but it's sure nice that they "give back" and kind of pay their own way.

Learning to spit

Jesse, Sarah and Margot came up a couple of weekends ago and I grabbed a few pictures of Margot learning how to spit watermelon seeds. I don't know how you guys do it, but here in the South we like to eat watermelon outside and just spit the seeds as we go. The squirrels and bird love them and for kids in particular, it's just plain fun. "Really? I can spit them out?" It seems a bit crass at first I guess, but it's certainly the way to go around here.

Here is Margot (with her new and first haircut), inspecting her piece of watermelon, perhaps looking for more seeds to spit:

And digging in:

And, though you can't see her face here, she is concentrating very hard on the art of spitting. I think she enjoyed it!

Paleo Quick Breakfast Poppers

That's what I call the new, fun breakfast I've been eating lately... a breakfast you can mix and cook in a coffee mug! I got the idea from several Paleo recipes I found online (a big thank you to whoever originally came up with the concept) and tweaked it until it was what I wanted. (I'm not "officially" Paleo so don't care whether or not cavemen ate vanilla extract or baking powder.) Since I no longer eat oatmeal in the mornings, I'd been looking for a wheat-free replacement since I don't want to eat eggs every day - even though I have a constant and fresh supply. And I missed my old pancakes and waffles. They were gluten-free but weren't grain free. Why am I grain-free? I will write a post about that soon. Anyway, these little poppers satisfy my desire for something soft, mushy and sweet in the morning - without the use of any sugar spiking grains, gluten or sugar. And, oh yeah, for me one of these is plenty filling. And, one more big plus: if you leave out the sweet stuff, you can eat it like regular bread; how cools is that? I've made scrambled egg sandwiches with them and they're wonderful.

RECIPE

Makes: 1 serving
Time: one minute plus however long it takes you to mix the following ingredients together 
Calories: before toppings: 231
"Health" Rating: Totally depends on if you believe conventional wisdom or more recent studies regarding cholesterol and saturated fat 

Ingredients:
1 egg
2 tablespoons ground flax seeds (I grind mine very fine)
1 tablespoon blueberries or other small or cut up fruit (bananas are good)
1 tablespoon chopped walnuts
1 teaspoon coconut oil
1/2+ teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 to 1 teaspoon vanilla and/or almond extract 
1/4 teaspoon aluminum free baking powder
Dash of salt
1 packet of stevia 

Directions:

1.  Put all the ingredients in the mug you are going to cook it in, or mix in a small bowl. I use a bowl because the coffee mug I use is pretty narrow. Be sure to use a straight-sided coffee mug or container so the popper can be removed easily. You can use different shaped containers to achieve another shape; I want to try an English muffin shape next.  

2. Mix really well with a fork and pour into coffee mug if you're using a bowl for mixing. Don't let "batter" sit around for long or the flax will absorb all the liquid and the popper won't rise as much.

3. Put into microwave and cook for approximately one minute, depending on your microwave. Open door and check it out! It's all puffed up and ready to go.

4. Popper will just pop out of mug. I cut mine in half and add a little butter. You can see the blackberries and walnuts in this one if you look closely. The fruit settled towards the bottom.

5. Then I add some home-made strawberry sauce and more blackberries.

It's super quick and easy with very little clean-up. And you can easily tweak it for your own taste preferences.

The Twilight Zone

I feel I need some sort of a delayed segue starting from before I took my hiatus until now... a little explanation as to why I disappeared for a few months - before I start in on regular blog topics. So, while I'm brewing some tea, let me ramble a bit...

The main reason for my hiatus was my poor state of mind coming out of winter - caused by several factors. Winter was hard for Mike and me - financially, since his business is slow during the cold months and his unethical ex-mechanic ruined the relationship he had with his main winter vendor. It really sucked because that relationship and the work that came from it was our winter bread and butter. I was looking out the window at all the grey skies and bare trees reaching towards the heavens and wondering if we were going to make it here.

I've always been frugal, but I've had to put it into overdrive here in Dogpatch. I have worn out holes in all my work jeans and I can tell you that the iron-on patches they make these days don't last like they did when I was a kid and much harder on them! After a few washes, they start peeling off. Why is everything so poorly made nowadays? (That is a rhetorical question since I already know the answer to it.) We are using and re-using as much as we can. Normally I would have bought new jeans by now, but with money so tight, I'm fixing and repairing and making do. I've always done that up to a point, but this past winter I had to get serious with it. 

In addition to the gray skies of winter and financial worry, I was helping Mike's company with all the year-end paperwork. Tax stuff. It was very time consuming and I really just didn't have the opportunity to play much on the computer. I had to key-in every receipt from 2011 for starters. Talk about tedious. But it was necessary.

And, I was also spending a lot of time revamping my diet to make it totally grain-free. And mostly sugar free and dairy free and a few other frees as well. At first it seemed exhausting doing all the research following the results I'd gotten from my doctor, but as I was able to collect the new ingredients I'd be using - and putting theory into action - it turned into fun testing out new recipes and doing a major overhaul of my eating habits. It was a challenge, but food challenges have always been fun for me when the goal is to be as healthy as possible. More on all that soon. 

Now it's spring and everything is green and beautiful and we made it through the winter. And there is
more business at the shop every day. But it's still bit scary because a small town like this is a hard place to make a living. We're not sure why, though I'm beginning to think we moved into the Twilight Zone because it is just so odd and different here. Mike works his butt off and gets new customers all the time, but it's still a struggle. Some of the people here are just... not to be understood (that's a kind way of putting it). But we keep trudging forward and keeping our chins and attitudes up. We are both very positive and that most certainly helps.

I've thought about getting a temporary job, but would have to drive quite far to find anything. Mike says it's not even necessary to think about at this point, but it's something I would do in a heartbeat if I thought it was necessary. 

So there you have it. Life is a struggle. For everyone. I don't dwell on my struggles, but just wanted to do a word dump and now move on to other things. Like my crazy chickens and goofy Dusty, the gardens and cooking and who knows... maybe even some politics! Ha!

Whatever, it's good to be back. 

Please excuse the mess

Hi guys! I've been gone so long that when I checked back here yesterday I felt all cramped and stifled, like I need more room to spread out. So, I'm going to do some remodeling and it might look a little messy while I'm at it since I will be "live" as it's happening. I'm going to start blogging soon too, though I should probably have my head examined since it's gardening time and I'm crazy busy. But, I miss being here and I want to get back to it. So, please pardon any weird formatting issues that might be happening soon; it's been awhile since I configured this place and I'm sure some layout will look funky while adjustments are being made. Hopefully you can just step over the mess and still be able to look around.