For Dinner This Week: Bok Choy

We grew some delicious Bok Choy in the greenhouse this year!

Check out how big those leaves are!

Some of the leaves are even bigger than my head.

That being said. With a big harvest of Bok Choy in hand, it was time to make dinner. The bok choy went from the greenhouse to our mouths in less than an hour. Can't get much more fresh than that!

I choose this recipe from allrecipes.com. Delicious spicy bok choy in garlic sauce.  

The sauce is really the best part.

After sauteing the bok choy, you cover it with the sauce.

We served the recipe over brown rice. This is the best recipe for bok choy we have ever had. Spicy, sweet, and mouth watering. A complexity of flavors in each bite. I strongly recommend! 

What is your favorite bok choy recipe?

Thanks for reading

For dinner this week: BBQ Chicken

Kelsi and I rarely eat meat these days. So, when we do, it is a treat! Most people just figure we are vegetarians, and rightfully so. That's a safe term to describe us, vegetarian, or "vegetarianish". I cannot remember the last time we ate meat before this past Friday. Since we only eat meat that we produce ourselves, or that we buy from a responsible farmer directly, our meat consumption is rare. Very rare. We have very high expectations about the treatment and raising of animals for food. Since we cannot create change in the way meat is produced other than at our own home, it's easier to just abstain from eating the meat we do not agree with. Unfortunately, the meat that we don't agree with happens to be everywhere.

The chicken we ate on Friday was raised here, processed here, and eaten here. Doesn't get more local than that. We barbecued the chicken in a spicy Jamaican Jerk sauce that we got while on our honeymoon last summer. It was the best bbq'd chicken I have had in a long time! 

As a side, we cooked potatoes on the grill from Tolstoy Farms, purchased at the Spokane Farmer's Market.

Another side we cooked up was asparagus from Pacific Produce, also from the farmer's market.

For Saturday's dinner we had pizza with the leftover chicken from Friday nights grill.

We also used our own spinach on the pizza! Isn't that spinach awesome!

Homegrown lettuce for the salad. Beautiful!

I love how local we can eat once the weather warms up!

Are you cooking what your growing yet?

Thanks for reading!

For dinner this week.

Here is a good way to use up the greens from the top of your carrots instead of composting them or giving them to the chickens.

Crushed red pepper and carrot greens pesto. Delicious! It was a little bitter, but the hotness of the peppers covered it up nicely. Check out the recipe HERE.

Let me know if you try it!

Do you have a recipe for commonly discarded vegetable parts? Carrots tops? Broccoli stems?

Thanks for reading!

For Dinner this week

I love beets! They were reasonably priced this week at the store so we bought a bunch. A couple days ago we had oven roasted beats with sauteed beet greens and stems. We have made this recipe a few times before and it is so delicious! 

I always add ingredients that aren't called for when I cook. If you try this recipe, I added mushrooms before the onions and garlic, and I added feta cheese at the end. I have added fresh diced hot peppers with the onions in the past and that is also good. You can add the stems sooner than the leaves if you want softer stem. I personally like the crunch of the stem in contrast the the wilt of the beet leaves. Serve over your favorite noodle. Red wine vinegar on the whole beets! Delicious!

We plan to grow a ton of beets this summer.

What's your favorite beet recipe?

Thanks for reading! 

A really small egg and Ratatouilli

Just a short post for tonight. 

Tonight for dinner Kelsi and I had Ratatouille, spinach fettucini, and blue potatoes. Delicious! 

This lil fella is from one of our hens that just started laying. 1.5oz! That's the smallest we have ever had.

Thanks for reading!

Hippie.

As most of you know, I am in nursing school right now and it keeps me pretty busy. I have a funny story that happened today at clinicals. We have a pretty strict dress code for us while at the hospitals, this code however, happens to not be gender specific. My instructor told me that some of the other instructors had engaged her in a conversation about my hair! This is funny to me because my hair is long, but not that long. I was likened to Justin Biebber(Whom I had to look up) or a hippie from the 60's and 70's. I decided that I didn't mind being likened to a hippie. That's not a bad thing right? 

-A lot of hippies started communes and were very self sufficient, as we strive to do! Quite well most of the time. We can, dehydrate, and preserve foods to last through the winter and we are slowly learning grow things and we are getting better every year! A married couple named Mr. and Mrs. H have a really nice model of self sufficiency on their blog

-Hippies are naturalist and support the environment! That's a great quality to have! We produce very little trash, we compost yards and yards of otherwise waste, and we buy chemical free cleaners and body care items. We diligently recycle even though there is no recycle service in our area and we have to take it in to a recycle center in the city.

- Hippies are often vegetarian or vegan or simply just healthy eaters. That's us too! We only eat meat we produce here, or from a source we can personally inspect and verify just and moral treatment of animals. 

I know hippies did a lot of other things, such as freelove and partaking in the use of psychedelic drugs that we don't do. However, I think that a lot of the moral values that hippies represented are great and should be carried on, especially in our disposable world we are living in.

On another note. The rooster I talked about last night has passed away. He went peacefully this afternoon in a soft bed of straw. Poor guy. Now Jane's babies are standing at 3 alive out of 7 hatched. Not a very good survival rate.

We also cooked up one of our homegrown meat chickens tonight. Raised here, processed here, and eaten here, just how it should be done. We smothered it in Jerk Sauce that we bought while on our honeymoon in Jamaica. 

Delicious!

Thanks for reading

Mousing, Halpern Homestead record, and winter madness.

Since the addition of a silly cat named Henry awhile back, the mice have been on high alert. He is a master hunter! We often find mousicles in the yard or see him throwing them around. He brings them to the house to show off, then him and Julies throw the mouse around for awhile. 

How about a play by play.......

He waits in the bushes before slowly creeping out.

Looks around for prey.

Licks his lips in anticipation.

He then enlists the help of his hired 'Muscle'

He marks the spot.

 She digs.

No luck here

 Hi dad.

Winter gave Spokane a huge blast this past week or so. It is so cold, the birds are reluctant to come out if the coop. Usually just the webbed footed ones are brave enough to test the cold. It was -8 degrees last week. Brrrr.

 The birds know how to keep warm though. They make big bird piles at night and huddle up together.

 They also set a Halpern Homestead record yesterday. A 20egg day! That's a lot. We have been getting over a dozen a day for more then a week, and the productivity keeps increasing. Each day another egg more than the last.

It's also Chanukah right now so we have lots of family dinners to attend. We hosted the family at our house last night. We served free range turkey and a vegetarian spaghetti. Everything was so good!

 We tried to take a family photo, but Henry wasn't having any of that.

 That's better.

 Grandpa and Grandma Halpern.

 Some photos of the snow mess.

 We bought this 300gallon stock tank on CL for $125. We plan to us it as a bigger pond for the webbies this spring. Just need to flatten some ground for it. We will also use it for livestock when we move to our forever home.

That's it! Thanks for reading

Pizza Night

Tonight, I thought we would have pizza for dinner. I have never made pizza before, but I have this great vegetarian cookbook that has a recipe for pretty much anything! You can purchase the cookbook here. I started out by preparing the dough.

Then, I had to cook up the pizza sauce. It was delicious. I have cooked this same sauce to use on spaghetti and with eggplant parmesan. It is fast, easy and very tasty.

Once the dough had risen and my sauce was ready, I patted out the dough and created my raw pizza! We like mushrooms and peppercini's on our pizzas.

And... here is the finished product. It was delicious and only in the oven for about 8 minutes on 500 degrees. I tend to like the dough a little doughier and it was perfect. 

If you are interested in creating this delicious pizza, let me know and I will email it to you!

Lots of love.

Chicken Processing: not graphic

So, as many of you know Kelsi and I are very disappointed with the way American meat is raised and processed these days. We decided that if we wanted to continue to conscientiously eat meat we were going to have to take it into our own hands. Truthfully this is much easier said than done. Around the first of March Kelsi and I decided to buy ten Cornish cross meat birds.

 

We will never buy this kind again. We lost two of them in the first two weeks and the other 8 seemed to be so old, their little legs couldn’t support the massive bodies and only place they were able to walk was to their food and water, other than that their whole days were spent sitting. We hadn’t researched this bird much before purchasing and we definitely learned the hard way that birds selectively bread to get bigger, fatter, sooner aren’t the kind of bird we want on our farm.

So this week the birds were up to size and we decided it was time to process. I must say that I was very concerned about this act. I haven’t ever killed anything besides bugs and fish. It was hard and it was a life changing experience for me. Never have I felt so close to my food. It gave me the same rewarding feeling that I get when I bring a huge load of fresh veggies up from the garden, or a huge stack of eggs from the coop. It sounds like such a romantic idea. I have a lot of respect for the animals whose lives are given up to support mine.

Grow your own food. Process your own food. Live healthier. Live happier.

Kelsi and I were completely responsible for everything to do with these chickens except the hatching, so we got to see what they ate, where they lived, and that they were processed in a humane and respectful manor. I think that if one is passionate about how their food is produced than this would be a rewarding experience for that person. The hens that we raised died so that we can live on.

I just want to show some things involved in the process without getting graphic

This is the chicken plucker that I made. It fits into a regular drill and spins, this removes the feathers rather quickly. It is very simpler and easy to make. It is just a 4in sewer cap with black rubber bungee cords pieces hanging out the sides. Each bungee was cut to a few inches in length, then cut in half  length ways leaving a nub on opposite sides to keep them from flying of the plucker. 

Supplies:

4in sewer cap: 1.85

3/8 carriage bolt: 1.58

2- 21in black bungees w/ s-hook: 4.58

2 each- 3/8 nuts/washers: .48

Total cost: $8.49 for a pretty darn good little plucker

Another view. 16 plucker fingers in total.

This is the plucker station. The plucker is mounted with a corded drill by zip ties through the board.

 This is our outdoor processing station. It was a nice way to spend the morning, outside processing meat the way it used to be done. On the right are the cones that the birds are inverted into and then drained in. On the left is the turkey fryer used for scalding prior to plucking

Supplies used:

2- large street cone: 12.00

Used 5 gal painters buckets: Free(I had them already)

Turkey fryer with pot and base: 65.21

Total cost: 77.21

This is the folding table we used to clean out the chicken.

Butcher table: 29.00

 8 chickens, after an ice bath

Ice bath bin: 9.99

 The finished product. We ended up with 5 whole chickens, 3 halves for the bbq and I split one up for breasts, legs/things and bones for the stock.

 Making stock. Lots of fresh veggies involved.

We ended up with 11 8oz jars of stock. The stock is more of a broth based on the amount of chicken flavor. We probably didn't use enough chicken in it. Not bad though for our first time making stock.

That's it, thanks for reading!