Sugar Creek Farm

This was the sight that greeted me after work today when I headed out to feed the chickens and ducks. Immediately I set down my pail of hot water and trotted back to the house for the camera. That’s what I love about photography, and about having this blog. It makes me slow down, notice, appreciate.

Tuesday’s are busy days. I get off work at 5:00, do chicken chores, put something together for supper, and leave at 6:30 to take Madeline to dance class in a town a half hour away. Ordinarily I’d rush through my after-work tasks to get on the road on time.

But my eye stops me now. A voice whispers, “Look at that!” And I do. And I try my best to capture in a file of pixels what my eye sees.

Unfortunately this picture does no justice to real life.

All of the cattle staring at the crazy girl with the camera.

It’s finally winter. Brrrr! My ducks refuse to come back to the house. They’re hanging out on the neighbors’ side of the creek along the bank. So I trekked out there with a bucket of feed for them this morning. Not an easy task, as it’s entirely overgrown and there were many sharp sticks trying to poke me in the eye.

The ducks were very happy to see me. Well, probably not me. They were very happy to see the bucket of feed. They wouldn’t follow me back to the house for it, though.

It was actually pretty nice at that spot, protected as it is from the wind. Made me feel a little better about them being out there. But still they keep me up at night, worrying about them in the snowstorm and the below-zero temperatures. I’m trying to talk Matt into doing an intervention and trying to catch them all without falling in the creek ourselves.

Updated: fixed the PFI link

Ike thinks he’s a lap dog.

I’m off to the PFI Conference. Looking forward to meeting up with acquaintances old and new, ideas and inspiration, and of course the all-Iowa food! Better pack my stretchy pants.

The last of the ’06 beef will be butchered in a couple of weeks. We have one quarter left, just shoot me an email if you want it:

themillers92 (at) osage (dot) net

We do also have one whole steer that will go to the salebarn if we don’t sell his 4 quarters. So if you have 1 or 2 or 3 friends or neighbors that you’d like to split with, we’ll see if we can get the locker to fit us in. Or, we’d be happy to haul it to a locker near you as long as you’re taking the whole steer (within a reasonable driving distance).

Taking a whole steer might also work well for a retail establishment – restaurant or grocery store. Contact me at the email above for wholesale pricing if you’re interested.

Some days for my lunch break I grab the camera and head outside. I need the fresh air and a little distance from my computer monitor. These days it’s dark by the time I get out to do chicken chores, so it’s nice to see everyone before they go to roost.

I could only see our Mr. Duck and New Drake on the creek, so I went looking for the other 17 ducks. I looked in the chicken coop, in the southern part of the pasture, around the hog huts, all the usual places but no ducks. I gave up and headed down the driveway to retrieve the mail from the mailbox.

And what to my wondering eyes should appear but ducks on the side of the road. About 8 of them were hanging out alongside the road, right where the creek crosses under it (and where there used to be a bridge).

The rest of the missing ducks were down alongside the creek.

Sometimes I wonder what passersby must think of the goings-on out here.

Madeline’s favorite part of chores is driving the tractor. As she’s taken on responsibility for feeding the breeding gilts and boar, I’ve noticed a marked increase in confidence in her. A good thing to have entering the middle school years.

(or, Why some people think we’re crazy)

Last time we had beef butchered I asked the locker to save us 20 pounds of fat. They don’t render lard anymore, because their machine broke and there just isn’t much call for it. They gave me a look, but over time they’ve become pretty accomodating to my many crazy requests.

But I think they gave us a little more than 20 pounds:

We only got through one of these chunks. The whole point of this little exercise is to learn to make soap. So yesterday we set about with Step 1, rendering the beef fat into tallow. I cut off chunks and Matt fed them through the meat grinder. The kids are rather excited about the prospect of making our own soap, and they all wanted to help with the grinding.

I started with an inch or two of water in my largest stock pot, and as Matt got a dinner plate filled with ground fat I’d add it to the pot. We brought the fat to a boil and then turned it down to a simmer, periodically skimming off the cracklings and unrenderables.

We had several bowls ready, each with a little water in the bottom. Matt ladled the fat into the bowls and we let them set for a day.

Tonight I cut it into pieces, seran wrapped the pieces, and put them in the freezer. I hope we did this right. The directions we used said that once the tallow was set there would a gelatinous layer on the bottom that would need to be rinsed off under cold running water. We didn’t have anything like that. Anyone out there know? Perhaps because when we ladled it into the bowls most of the “junk” was left in the bottom of the stockpot. The fat that went into the bowls was very clean.

We ended up with 17 pounds of cakes. They’re really pretty, an absolutely pristine white. I’m tempted to take some and make a pie crust, like my mother-in-law used to.

Next step is to find a good beginner soap recipe, and acquire a soap pot and the other necessary tools and ingredients. Advice?

10-Grain Bread loaves I baked as a Christmas gift

So, vacation’s over. I enjoyed a much-needed break from my computers. But tomorrow it’s back to the day job.

Being an everyday listmaker, you can imagine that the New Year’s Resolution List is something I jump into with gusto. A couple of years ago I stole an idea from Superhero Journal – a multi-list concept, you can go read about it over there.

One of my “10 Things I Intend to Create in My Life in 2007” was this:

To continue to cultivate peace and contentment in my life

But the word “contentment” is troublesome to me. It’s definition is “happiness with one’s situation in life.” It implies a sort of endplace, where you need nothing more than what you have.

It’s true that I need nothing more than what I have right now. I’m happy in my life, happy in the people and activities that make up my days. And yet I’m a person that is constantly trying to grow, learn, change, push my limits. I have dreams that I want to work toward. But when I voice those desires, my dear husband invariably accuses me of being discontent.

So what do you think, dear reader? What is your definition of contentment?

(And coincidentally, I read this post after I wrote this one. She points right at what I’m trying to get at, but with so much more poetry. Simply beautiful.)

Cow and chickens

Olivia and I went to Iowa City yesterday for another followup on her new eardrum. It ended up feeling like a real waste of 6 hours of driving. The doctor took a look in her ear, declared she had an ear infection, and sent us home with an augmentin prescription and some ear drops. We’re to go back in 6 weeks.

Her ear troubles have not slowed her down any at learning the piano. She played two Christmas hymns in church Sunday for the offertory music and did a wonderful job! Then she came home and figured out Jingle Bells and Silent Night by ear.

Posting may be scarce this week as I’m spending time on the gifts I’m making and on cookie making and bread baking. I have to say that despite the crazy busyness of the season I am truly enjoying almost every minute of it, and managing to just be in the moment and not let things done or undone stress me out. Creating gifts and making food for people are two things that bring me a lot of joy.

I’m still ruminating on a post about Matt’s coral. It’s a difficult thing to capture in a picture, unless you happen to have a helicopter to get you a birdseye view. I may just have to draw a picture of it instead. Also still in the works is a post about the corncrib, to give us a chance to pick the brains of Christian and any other engineer-types reading this little blog about how to renovate it.