Terrabyte Farm

I know I have said it many times before, but the reason we made the big leap to start our own homestead was to raise the absolute best food possible.  That is because we both really love to cook and eat and so do our kids.  As much as we have loved buying from many local farmers over the years, doing this ourselves is so incredibly rewarding.  Here are a few of the food highlights from this week:

BBQ Spare Ribs with Collard Green Slaw and Buttermilk Cornbread

I took the ribs and cut them into 3-4 rib pieces.  I put them in the slow cooker along with a pint of our homemade ketchup (which was really more like bbq sauce than ketchup) and a half pint of homemade hot pepper jelly.  It cooked on low for about 8 hours, then I strained the sauce, boiled it down with some vinegar and sugar, glazed the ribs and then stuck them under the broiler for about three minutes.  Yum, yum, yum!  I subbed fresh collard greens for cabbage in the slaw and we had the yummiest meal ever.

Homemade BTKs and Cukes and Onions

We made a loaf of our absolute favorite Artisan Bread, fried up some bacon from our pigs, sliced up two perfect tomatoes from the garden, and instead of lettuce, MIke sauteed some kale briefly in the bacon fat and we ate that on the sandwich.  It is hard to imagine anything more delicious, all grown here.  We ate some cukes and onions (sliced cukes with vidalia onions in a 1:1:1/2 solution of water, white vinegar, and sugar) with it.

Grilled veggie pasta with Wheat Bread and Peach and Ginger Chutney

Every other day I must bring it 5-10 lbs of food.  Our tomatoes are going crazy.  What I like to do is halve them, scoop out the seeds and pop them under the broiler.  I also do peppers this way about once a week.  I grilled up squash, eggplant, and onions.  I love having these things just sitting in the fridge, I use them in pasta, eggs, salsa.  If I get too much, I freeze some for later.  For lunch, we tossed together the veggies, roughly blended them with a stick blender and then tossed that with pasta.  We also tried the light wheat bread from Artisan Bread and we ate it with cream cheese and the peach and ginger chutney we made a few weeks ago.  We almost ate the entire loaf.

In addition, Jackson and I dug up our second row of potatoes, a combo of fingerlings, red boiling potatoes, and a russet type.  We got about 6o lbs of spuds.  We took the small ones and pressure canned them, this was an easy way to store potatoes that would otherwise not store well and this winter we can eat them out of the jar, or through them in with soups, casseroles, etc.  We also took about 12 lbs of the russets and shredded them in the food processor, blanched them, then formed them into patties and put them in the freezer.  Now we have ready-to-go hash browns.  We boiled a bunch more of the potatoes (all of the ones that had dings or bruises and wouldn’t keep) and have about 30lbs of fresh potatoes in the cupboard to eat over the next month or two.  We still have one row of potatoes in the garden, these are our Kennebecs which we will cure and hopefully store in the basement to eat all winter long.  We expect, based on the yields of the other two rows that we will likely get 60-80lbs.

We also canned three pints of cucumber sandwich slices and made a pint of crystalized ginger and about four quarts or ginger syrup to add to club soda for homemade ginger ale.

Tonight we went out and picked tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, collards, kohlrabi, beans, and rutabagas.

We also butchered five of our rabbits.  In the next day or two we will be making bunny burgers, rabbit kebabs, and stewed rabbit.  We will be trying to see what we like best as neither of us has eaten rabbit before.  I am tanning their hides (waste not, want not) and making lucky rabbits feet for Jackson.  We have eleven more rabbits to process, and will likely do that over the course of this week.  The woman we bought them from taught us how to dispatch  them in the most humane way possible with a small air pistol.  I am very happy to say that their deaths were instantaneous and they did not appear to suffer at all.  They were also very easy to skin and gut, MUCH easier and faster than chicken.  From a 4 1/2 pound live rabbit, we got 2 lbs of dressed meat plus the hide.  Not a bad return.  We will keep you posted on how we like the meat and may even post a tutorial.

Happy eating!