Baking bread

People have been grinding grains and making bread for eons, and yet really good bread has not come easy to me. I have been on a quest to learn how to bake that really special bread for a few months now and I am still not there! But I am getting a little closer. Today I was finally able to bake bread using only flour that we had milled ourselves. We bought our Country Living Grain Mill in January and we bought our first 50 lb. bag of whole grain at the end of January, but we just now got the mill mounted securely enough to do serious grinding. Right now it is still enough of a novelty that the kids are volunteering to help. That doesn't usually last real long!

I bought a copy of Laurel Robertson's "The Laurel's Kitchen Bread Book" and have found some really good recipes in there. I have made the "yogurt bread" the last few times and have been pretty happy with the results.



Sponge ingredients:

1 tsp. active dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water


3 cups whole wheat bread flour
2 tsp. salt


3 tbsp. honey
2/3 cup yogurt
1/3 cup cold water


Dissolve the yeast in the 1/4 cup warm water. Mix the flour and salt in a bowl; add the honey, yogurt, cold water, and dissolved yeast, making a stiff dough. Knead about 5 minutes, and set aside in a cool space, snugly covered to keep the dough from drying out, but with plenty of room in the container for the sponge to rise. Put in refrigerator for 10 hours.

Dough Ingredients:

1 tsp. active dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water


the sponge
1/4 cup oil


3 cups whole wheat flour


Dissolve the yeast in the warm water. Soften the sponge with the liquids and work in the rest of the flour measure, adjusting the consistency as required. Knead until silky, about 15 minutes.
Form the dough into a ball and place it smooth side up in the bowl. Cover and keep in a warm, draft-free place. After about an hour check to see whether the dough is ready. Gently poke your wet finger about 1/2 inch deep into the center of the dough. If the hole doesn't fill in at all or if the dough sighs, it is ready for the next step. Press flat, form into a smooth round, and let rise once more as before. The second rising will take about half as much time as the first.
Press the dough flat and divide it in two. Round it and let is rest until relaxed, then deflate and shape into loaves. Place in greased 8"x4" loaf pans and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until the dough slowly returns a gently made fingerprint. I make a long vertical cut along the top of the bread. Bake 45 minutes to an hour at 350 degrees F. I highly suggest Laurel's book, it has lots of great information in it about all of the steps involved, how it should look, etc. in addition to all of the wonderful recipes.
The two loaves that I made today will be gone by Friday!



Today I received the whole corn that I had ordered, my next adventure will be grinding corn and trying to make corn tortillas.

And of course there is the bread oven that I need Bryan to build for me.



Marie, of Edith and Marie our GOS pigs, has learned how to get out of their yard. These girls LOVE to eat and they have definite ideas about when they should be eating. Should we be running late to feed, Marie thinks it is her responsibility to round us up and let us know that everyone is hungry. We had put a latch and a bungee cord on the gate, but that didn't seem to be enough as she was out again this afternoon. We have chained the gate now, hopefully this will be enough to keep her from wandering off. I think we will be trying to get them moved out to one of the big yards in the next few days. This will give them an opportunity to meet Annie and Big Daddy through the fence before we put them all together. And hopefully with a bigger herd it will help quell her adventurous spirit.

Other than baking bread and rounding up pigs, today was filled with such glamorous jobs as going to the dump and picking up yet more grain for the pigs. We just picked up 1000 lbs. 8 days ago. We bought another 1100 pounds today, guess we'll see how long that will last. I guess that is why they call them pigs!

All the signs of spring....

From my recent observations in the turkey yard, I am certain that turkeys make a compelling argument against random evolution. I cannot figure out how they have survived as a species up until this point. I am, of course, referring to "turkey love". After watching the shenanigans going on out there I had to pull out my copy of Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and reread the passages on turkey reproduction and laugh myself silly. (I highly recommend the book, if you haven't had a chance to read it.) I understand that most of the turkey's confusion is a result of the selective breeding that has been done and that breeding for natural instincts and mating abilities has not always been on the list of priorities. All that being said, the turkey show has been a good one this week. We should start getting eggs in a few weeks. I am sure hoping that our hens will brood, turkey poults bought from the hatchery have a notoriously high mortality rate, and I am really curious to find out whether or not "mama raised" birds are as fragile.

As for other signs of spring, the garden seeds came in this week. I cannot wait to get out there and play in the dirt. We are planning on planting lots of veggies this year, planting in both of our garden areas, as well as trying some grains. This will be our first experience growing grain so that should be interesting. The other thing we are going to try this year is a "three-sisters" garden (http://faq.gardenweb.com/faq/lists/teach/2003045238014436.html). Now if only it were warm enough to plant.....

Check out our new listing on local harvest (http://www.localharvest.org/farms/M27331). Local harvest is doing such a great job matching up people that are interested in good, clean food with farmers that are working hard to produce a quality product. Most small farms do not have a huge advertising budget and getting the word out there is tough. It is wonderful to have organizations like Local Harvest to make it all a little easier.

Take it easy!

Steph

New pigs, new rabbits, and yummy chicken!

Life has been all sorts of fun for us here lately! We have been adding lots of new critters to our little mix here. Our "big" addition was our Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs. These have a really great story to go along with them, so I will try your patience and add it here. Hopefully I can make it interesting! A few weeks ago I was browsing other farmer's websites and ran across a picture of the Old Spots pigs, the picture was of a sow with a litter of piglets, and it was love at first sight. They are soooo cute, little "dalmatian" pigs. I decided that I must have some of those pigs. But then reality struck. They are not so easy to find. The closest breeder I could find in my preliminary search was in Kansas, way too expensive to ship from there. So it became a "some-day" dream. Then, a few days later, there was a post to one of the yahoo groups that I have subscribed to:

"Here is a request from the anonymous Zoo - Please reply directly to them if you can help. - Thanks, name removed
I am contacting to see if you might know of anyone currently looking for GOS pigs. We have two females born in April 2005 that we are looking to find a home for, but they cannot go for slaughter. Currently they live in our farmyard at the anonymous Zoo in Southern California and we are looking to downsize our animal collection in the farm. We already have some other pigs and it would be helpful to our budget and staff to find a new home for the GOS pigs. We raised them from piglets and they are pretty docile, we go in with them and such. If you know of anyone for one or both or want to forward my information it is appreciated. They were purchased from Winter Creek Farm in Oregon we can possibly help with transportation."

WOW! I immediately jumped on it. I got in touch with the people in charge and they were almost as excited as I was since we are as close to them as we are. They got everything approved and within 10 days we have two beautiful, old spots pigs. I have just had the warmest, fuzziest feeling possible when I think about how much God loves us that He will answer even our "silly" prayers. And that is how we came to have our Gloucestershire Old Spots pigs, Edith and Marie. We are giving them a few weeks to get used to their new surroundings, feed, keepers, etc. before we introduce them to the other pigs. We are planning to breed them with our Berkshire boar for now. At some point we hope to be able to breed some purebred GOS pigs and help to continue this great heritage breed.

We were also able to get some Silver Fox rabbits! Another great story. We have been hoping to add rabbits to the mix for almost a year now. We have been doing our research, reading up on rabbits, joined the ARBA (American Rabbit Breeders Association), and reading information on yahoo groups (again with the yahoo groups). We had decided that we really liked the Silver Fox rabbits, they are listed as critical on the http://www.albc-usa.org/ website. They are a dual purpose rabbit, excellent for both meat and fur. They are the only rabbit whose fur, when stroked from back to front will stand straight up, until it is stroked in the opposite direction. Again, a great breed, and again, very difficult to find. There is a huge rabbit show in October or November, the ARBA nationals, and we figured that would probably be our best bet. And then, another post to another group:

"I may have to drive to So Cal (Orange County, Anaeheim/Cypress) in the nextweek or two... Family health issues, and should have some Silver Foxavailable and be able to transport.. Please email me if you are interested in either."

Excitement again! I emailed her and, voila, we are the proud owners of a silver fox buck and a bred silver fox doe! We should have babies in about 30 days!

And, finally, we processed our Dark Cornish chickens on February 6th. To say we were amazed with the final results would be an understatement. I am hoping to hear from others who have tried them, but we were so pleased with the way they taste. We have already eaten two of them and they have both been the most delicious chicken we have ever had. Homegrown "frankenchickens" are very tasty, homegrown heritage chickens are even better. We will be getting some "Colored Range Broilers" the first of March. The breeding stock for these birds is from the birds used in the French "Label Rouge" free range program. They are "healthy, with a succulent flavor and texture". We will be keeping some of these along with the Dark Cornish that we kept as the beginning of our own breeding program. We only expect to have 12 chickens available out of this batch, we are planning to process them mid-May. If you would like to get some of these chickens, we would suggest that you reserve early!

Well, that is all of the big news for now! Thanks for reading.