It's been awhile since I did a farm update. Honestly, there is something always going on on the farm. Every season brings an evolution of chores and tasks that I find so wonderful. Okay, sometimes I don't like de-skinning tomatoes, the little ones pop like when Denethor is ravaging them in The Return Of The King. Eeh...
Sorry, my spine is now back in alignment. Anyway, this week and last was full of some very interesting to-dos that I thought you all might enjoy a gander at.
With it being harvest time, ripe apples are everywhere here in the Pacific Northwest. I am blessed to have some friends who have a plethora of hundred year old apple trees. They let us have all of their apples, and we in return take them many gallons of cider.
Pressing cider is pretty fun, especially when you have a commercial grade macerator to borrow. My hubs made his own grinder and press, both of which work great, but when you are doing several hundred pounds of apples, it's nice to trot out the big guns.
Tuesday was a treat of a workday because we got 14 gallons of fresh cider out of the last batch of apples for the season. If you haven't had fresh pressed cider, I so, so recommend you procure some. It's like sipping the fresh essence of an apple, a treat for all your senses!
Five gallons of the fresh cider went into the fermenter bucket and started it's journey toward becoming hard cider. I love hard cider, especially a dry, crisp, and not too sweet brew. Nothing says fall like a cup of hard cider and a freshly baked pumpkin cookie!
Since we had a ton of apples about, I really wanted to make my family some caramel to dip apple slices in, as it is one of their favorite things ever. Somewhere on the Interwebs I was reading that you can pour a can of sweetened condensed milk into a pie plate, cover it with foil, place that in a water bath, and bake it at 400 Fahrenheit for 60-90 minutes. After that super simple process was completed you were supposed to end up with a gooey golden brown caramel.
Guess what? I tried it and I did! It was such a simple process, which of course was why I was a bit skeptical, but boy am I glad I tried the experimentation, because that caramel looked so good! I only eat sugar once a week, so I didn't try it, but my family inhaled it, spearing the stuff out of the bowl with apple slices like ravens beaking roadkill.
Another food experiment that I did this week was overnight, no-knead artisan bread. I guess I shouldn't say experiment, I have done it before, but not for awhile. I love a crusty slice of chewy sourdough, but right now I have no time that I wish to cede to maintain a starter. The overnight bread fills the sourdough gap. I had a freshly washed and dried ice cream bucket lying in the drying rack that begged to be filled with fermenting dough.
I obliged.
After throwing in some flour, salt, yeast, I mixed in some lukewarm water and let the dough do its thing on the counter over night (covered). The next afternoon grabbed the dough out of the bucket, kneaded it a bit into a ball, let it rise, covered it with a towel, on the countertop, and baked it in a parchment-lined cast iron Dutch oven.
Holy crunchy crustopia! That bread was so good. I served it alongside a cheesy garlic one pot pasta I whipped up, and let's just say the bread was a perfect tool to soak up that gloriously garlicy sauce!
I want to perfect the bread recipe a bit, make it my own so to speak, before I post it on here, but if you are interested in trying it out, just search for overnight artisan no-knead bread or something close to that and you'll find the technique. I love it because it takes so little time and the results are just smashing!
And now for the surprise guest. All fall long we have been inundated with turkeys. Because of our weird hot weather, we had four hatches of wild turkey poults this year. I mean, my farm was starting to feel a bit like Jurassic Park meets The Birds as there were between 70-100 turkeys wandering around every day. The turks have departed now and there's a new sheriff in town.
As my husband was pressing the apples this week, he was dumping the apple offal behind our pizza oven. for a bit of over winter composting. I was inside doing chores when he came in and said, "Come look at this!"
He seemed a little more animated than normal, I figured it was just the massive amount of cider he wanted me to see, but then he started talking about her
I walked out the door and this is what I saw:
Isn't she precious! Little miss moose was laying right behind my pizza oven, snacking on cast off apple gore like a kid eating Cracker Jacks at a baseball game. It was the cutest thing ever, because she stayed there as content as could be for hours while we went about our business.
Now here's the thing, moose are actually something to be cautious around. They will stomp you and they are pretty large, but this little creature was born here, part of a line of moose that have come in every winter on our place, so we just know her and her kind pretty well. As long as they don't eat my super expensive hay and stomp me or the fam into a mud puddle, I'm more than content to have them around.
Plus, her little mouth smacking sounds of creature comfort contentment made me giggle with delight, which is always a good thing.😊