Preserving Eggs

I found myself with more eggs than I could reasonably use.  These weren't our eggs from my girls, Hubby sells them at his work.  These were from my work.

I gave some away, I made pavlova and Bacon and Egg Pie.

Because the hens go off the lay for winter, I thought it would be nice to have some put away that I don't have to buy for those months.  I make jokes about my hens being free-loaders and I know that it doesn't help that most of my birds are older.  I'm working on that.  I have some new hens of different breeds, one of the girls came to me with the story about how she usually raises 4 clutches of chicks each year so I'm living in hope.  The barred rocks are supposed to be great mothers too.

I decided to try drying some.  This is something I've seen mentioned in various homesteading and self-sufficiency websites.  I found a recipe and instructions and gave it a go.

I beat up six eggs and that was all that would fit in my plastic tray for my dehydrator.  I thought I might try lining others with baking paper, but my baking paper wasn't quite wide enough and I didn't want to be cleaning egg off everything.

The page I was going off said to use your fruit and vegetable setting - about 135 degrees.  So I thought I might dry some in the oven too.  I've used my oven to dry other things and it's worked reasonably well before.

I'm rather disappointed in myself for the stupid rookie mistake I made with this.  I know that most recipes I find online are in Fahrenheit and I always make the effort to double check temperatures and convert to Celsius.  Well, except for this time.  I cooked the eggs in the oven.  They went rubbery and looked rather disgusting on the whole.  My pigs didn't mind the addition to their diet though.

Cooked eggs from the oven "drying" failure.

The ones from the dehydrator seemed to work.  I've put them through the food processor like the instructions said to powder them, but they didn't break down to powder, more like crumbs.  I think that may be because it's a big food processor and not a lot of dried egg.  I spent a little time grinding it up in a mortar and pestle, but sore arms came rather quickly from that.  I'm currently drying more and I think I'll process them all together in one bigger amount.

Dried Eggs from the dehydrator.

As an experiment, I tried reconstituting some of the egg as per these instructions.  It said 2 tablespoons of egg powder to 1 tablespoon of warm water.  Stir and leave for 5 minutes.  This is supposed to be equivalent to 1 egg. NOPE.  That wasn't right.  I think it's the other way around.  1 - 1 1/2 tablespoons of powder to twice the volume of warm water.  I say 1 - 1 1/2 because from six eggs I got approximately 9 tablespoons of powder.  I played with it a bit and got what looked a little like beaten egg after a while.

I posted about this on facebook and got a lot more suggestions.  One friend said she freezes them in ice cube trays and then pops them out into zip lock bags and keeps them in the freezer.  I looked at my ice cube trays (that come with F&P freezers) and thought that one cube would barely fit the yolk so instead I froze a dozen eggs in a muffin tray.  The problem came from trying to pop them out.  They were stuck!  I had to partially thaw them so they came out easily and then put them back into the freezer.  We'll see how well that works out at a later date.

Eggs in muffin tray for freezing.

Other suggestions that I haven't yet tried are isinglass and pickling.  I will look into them at a later date. 

Spring has Sprung!

Well, Spring is certainly here going by all the new arrivals we've managed to get in the last week.

I'd heard that one of the women I work with was giving away lambs.  So I spoke to her and on Tuesday last week, I picked up two one week old orphan lambs.  Roastie and Lucy.  I spent a small fortune on Milk Replacement Powder and understand completely why she's given them away.  

Roastie (bottom) and Lucy (top)

Miss Eight is determined to keep Lucy as a pet and as she's apparently from very good breeding stock, there's no harm in that.  Roastie however, well, his name should tell you what his end shall be.  Even though he's lovely and has brown markings that look like he's fallen over in mud.

Mildred, my Kune kune sow dropped a litter of five piglets over the weekend.  Three boys and two girls.  They seem to be doing well and I think she's a good Mum.  Poor George isn't quite sure why he's suddenly on his own and is rather lonely.  When we're in his paddock, he spends all his time at our heels wanting attention and a scratch.

Mildred with her five little ones.

This morning, I noticed two new lambs bouncing around the paddock by the house.  Nibbles has finally dropped her two.  I got as close as I could without alarming her.  They weren't fully dry yet, I'm unable to tell what genders we have at this stage but they're bouncing around with plenty of energy so I figure they're healthy.

Nibbles with her lambs - the second one is by her head.

We still don't know and can't tell if Sheepy is pregnant (in lamb?).  We can't get close enough to see if an udder is forming.  We weren't sure if she would as she is just a hogget, although a large one.  We left her in with the ram with the theory that if she did, then she did.  If she didn't, then that was fine too.

The cows aren't due to calve until around Christmas.  I know it's rather late, but that was when we were able to get a bull and that's what we had to work with.  They're all showing signs of getting big and Brownie, the only one who hadn't previously had a calf, is getting an udder.  Eddie's udder never shrunk much after Ron was weaned so that wasn't much help but she's getting wide.

Update - several hours later.

It would seem that Nibbles hadn't finished when I saw her with her lambs this morning.  We have triplets!

Nibbles with THREE babies, and Sheepy looking on.

Homekill Steers

I said in my previous Sausage Making post that I'd be writing heaps about what I've done with our steer, and then proved myself a complete liar by not (yet) writing another word.

I'm not quite sure where to start with this.

It is my belief that I owe it to my animals to be present for their slaughter.  I know a lot of people will not get this, they will look at me sideways and think I'm a bit odd.  It's okay, I'm used to that.  I am quite content with "a bit odd".

I had started to write a bit more in here, but it needed to be split into another post. See here for my little rant that started from this point and how disconnected society is from their food.

Anyway, I do feel that I should be present for the slaughter of my animals for meat.  I have been responsible for their care and well-being, I have raised them and given them the best that I possibly can.  Now they'll be dying so that I can continue to eat and provide food for my family.  It's a mark of respect and honouring their contribution to my freezer.

I made Hubby and Miss Eight watch Lamb Chop's slaughter last year.  I think it's important for them to see the change from living breathing animal to meat.  I don't want my children to grow up being unaware and disconnected from their food.

The homekill man came out and did one steer at a time.  One of them was for a friend.  We've been grazing a cattle beast for him and when he asked how much he should pay us, I suggested that when he gets his one slaughtered and butchered, he do ours at the same time.

Having learned from last time, I asked for the offal before he'd even taken a shot.  I had bowls and buckets ready for liver, heart and kidneys.  It turned out that I also needed a wheelbarrow.  I'd asked (half as a joke) about keeping the skin for tanning.  Hubby had been in touch with his step-father about the tripes.  His step-father adores tripe and onions as much as Hubby still finds the memory of eating them to be traumatising.

There was a lot that I hadn't thought of though that normally seems to go for offal.  "Cheeks and tongue?" Bishop (the homekill man) said to me very early on.  I took the cheeks.  I'd never had them, but I'd seen them used and raved over on a tv cooking show.  I wasn't quite brave enough for the tongue (not for eating anyway) and so with equal parts gratitude and disgust, Clegg (the friend who'd bought all of the people concerned with these cattlebeasts together) took both.

I used the cheeks for the steak in steak, kidney and mushroom pies that I made for Hubby.  The mushrooms were also grown here.  Both Hubby and Miss Eight have raved over these fantastic pies and that the cheeks were perfect in them.

The tail was the next thing to be offered to me.  I've never eaten oxtail anything before.  For all my father was a farm boy, we never got offal at home.  I decided to give it a go and was given both of them, with the 'skirt' that he cut off from the inside of the beast then and there and a few cooking instructions.  Never put brassicas in an oxtail stew they all said.  I've also since been told by an Irish woman that dumplings are mandatory with this dish.

Now that I have cooked an oxtail stew, I completely get the dumplings.  It was thick and rich and oily.  It needed the dumplings to soak up some of the oil and tone down some of the richness.  It was probably the most tasty beef stew I've ever had, only marred by some of the tiny bones from the tip of the tail that I missed when I was straining out the bones.  I got one right on my front two teeth and I felt that for hours.

Heart, lungs, the fatty and tough bits from the kidneys and some of the liver went for dog food.  I've been making dog food this way on and off for years.  Chop it all up roughly, put into a slow cooker with some minced beef, rice, oats or pasta, some veges and a little garlic and cook for hours.  It usually forms it's own thick gravy and freezes well.  I froze 24 litres of this that day, and two large bags of offal that I didn't have pots for.  It stinks while you're cooking, so if you're able to run the slow cooker out the window on a table outside this is a much better option.  I also had two large preserving pans going on the barbecue.

He gave me the suets from both steers too.  "Give one to the chooks" he said.  "They'll go mad for it."  They didn't really know what to make of it for the first day or so.  Most of my hens were battery hens that had finished their commercial time.  But they did figure it out in the end.  I rendered the rest.  I have two containers in my fridge and a large amount in the freezer.

I'd told Hubby that he needed to be cleaning up the tripe.  I've seen it before when it comes out of the cow, he had only ever seen it partially precooked when his step-father bought it.  He wasn't prepared for the smell or the colour.  In some sympathy and some disgust, I dragged it over a gate and hosed it down for him to begin with.  Then told him that he was supposed to be cleaning it.  Five minutes and he sent his parents a text to tell them they could clean it and he'd drop it round in an hour or so.  He's 95% sure it ended up in the bin and that they'd been expecting to get it bleached and boiled.

By this stage, Bishop and Clegg were making jokes about how the offal guy was going to be beggared but were also quite happy to see that I don't believe in waste and think it's something that's wrong with people today.

"Oh, that's right" says Bishop, "You wanted the skin."  He picked up my animal's skin and we draped it over the gate to the paddock.  "When it gets to be too much for you love," he tells me, "Give me a call and I'll come and take it away.  Same for the offal you won't get through."  When?  He said "When it gets too much".  I should know myself better, but that made it a point of pride right then and there.  I have tanned the skin.  It nearly got to be too much for me but I kept hearing his slight condescension and the way he didn't really think I'd be able to do it all.

So he cleaned up and drove away, Clegg taking the cleaned carcasses to the butcher.  By the end of the next day, I had about 70kg of food for us and the dog in my freezer.  That was before I'd gotten any of the "normal meat" back.  It struck me then just how much waste there is.

I posted a link to a video on facebook months ago.  This video is apparently an advertising executive explaining to an audience how their own wilful ignorance allows the meat industry to get away with cruel and intensive farming practices.  Fortunately, most of the ones shown in the video don't happen in NZ.  Sadly though, there was a comment on my post - and I quote:

While it is the truth, the population density doesn't really allow for any other method to produce the amount of food required for consumers. The day of the Rancher who can make money is gone.. .so in order to really fix this, we have to go back to distributed smaller local companies producing the food for local market, however, there is no profit in that anymore... so, how do we fix the problem without creating food shortages? Stopping factory farming stops food production.. how do we replace the food?

Given that we tend to throw away about a fifth of the edible bits of cow when we slaughter for food, I disagree.  I've been seeing a push towards "Nose to Tail" eating and found this great blog. But in my experience, suggesting using any of these parts in dinner is met with such disgust and it really doesn't deserve that.  What it does need is a little inventiveness, a return to making your own smallgoods and maybe digging out Grandma's cookbooks.

I was sure I had taken some photos during this process, but I can't currently find any of them.  I will add them and update this post when I do.

Disconnects From Food and Factory Farming

I believe that as a society, we have become completely disconnected from our food.  There is this cute little pic, taken from what appears to be a newspaper clipping.  We all point and laugh, we hope that it's a wind-up - no one can really be that daft can they? - but deep down, there's a part of me that is concerned it's all too real.  Someone really believes this to be true.  I also have a song running through my head at the moment, especially the line "Peaches come from a can, they were put there by a man".

There are a lot of ways that I see this disconnect - especially regarding meat.  I saw someone ranting on about how ridiculous it was that a leg of lamb now cost $35 and that put it totally out of her price range.  I don't think she realised that it was the wrong season for fresh lamb and we'd had a very hard winter the year before.

Now let's just stop and focus on that little bit for a moment.  A hard winter means lamb at Christmas four to six months later is expensive.  Lambs are usually born late Winter to early Spring.  Down here in the South Island of New Zealand, we can get sudden unexpected blizzards any time from June to late September.  We did a couple of years ago, I was stuck inside for four days and completely grateful that I didn't have any livestock at that point.

In my little area, sheep-farming is predominant.  I was talking to the manager of our local large sheep estate and during that blizzard a couple of years ago, they lost more than a thousand lambs.  They were born during the blizzard (sheep tend to do this, I think it's a survival trait).  Lambs going from over 30 degrees Celsius in the womb to minus zero air temperature go into shock and die.  Their little bodies don't have the resources yet to keep themselves warm, and they're wet with amniotic fluids which cools their bodies more quickly and sometimes freezes before they've dried.  Their mothers are generally covered in a layer of snow on the ends of their wool and they can't completely envelop the lamb anyway.  The lamb's body temperature drops too fast and it kills them.  A day or two after birth, the lambs are better able to cope with a sudden drop in temperatures.

This station generally runs about 10,000 head of sheep.  I'm not sure what percentage of that is ewes in lamb.  I do know that most ewes have twins and sometimes triplets.  Because it's sheep, there is an expected rate of mortality.  It was explained to me as "Sheep just die sometimes, for no real reason at all.  It sometimes seems as though they go looking for new dumb ways to die.  The trick is to try to keep them alive for long enough to make a few quid off them."

Even if that thousand was 5% of their lambs for that year, that's still a considerable amount.  I suspect though it's more like 20 - 30%.  Now they have an amount of income they expect from the works in return for all the lambs they sell them.  There is nothing greedy about this (as some have suggested), they get paid once a year and they have certain costs that need to be covered to continue running.  Things like wages, vets, shearers, all the trappings to keep the animals well and healthy, and more expensively, contained in their correct paddocks and poachers kept out.

How would you cope with a 5% pay cut?  What about 20- 30%?  Most people I know live week to week.  5% for an entire year would cripple them.  So the works pay more for the lambs.  The scarcity pushes the prices up.  This isn't a new thing either.  I know for that year, the works was paying 30% more per lamb to keep their farmers going so that there would be lamb next year and possibly hogget in a few months.  When the works pays 30% more, they charge more for the meat that goes to the supermarket.  They have operating costs like staff wages etc to cover too. 

And that's how a hard winter increases the price of your leg of lamb at Christmas.  I also know that several farmers were disheartened by the way it dropped back down to a more normal rate the following year.

Now let's just take that a wee step further.  I've seen a lot of stuff this year regarding factory farming animals.  I've seen pictures of sows in farrowing crates with captions about how she spends her entire life stuck like this.  Tragically, this creates two problems for those supporting the factory farming issues.

Firstly, a farrowing crate is used purely for farrowing.  The sow has her litter of piglets (this is what farrowing means) and is in this crate for 1-3 weeks (it varies) until the piglets are big enough and strong enough to get out from under their mother and she has less ability to eat them.

I saw a number of things when my sow had her first litter of piglets.  An adult pig getting up from lying down is not a pretty or graceful event.  They roll around until they can get their feet under them to get up.  80 - 150kg of clumsy animal rolling around.  I saw two newborn piglets crushed when Mum rolled on them trying to get up to show me how clever she'd been. 

A local pig farmer told me that eating piglets is more common with gilts having their first litter.  She's a little confused about what has just happened, as many new mothers are, then something that smells like food crawls over her face.

Before this farmer began using farrowing crates, he had a very hard time staying in business and keeping staff.  There is nothing that drives staff morale down more than getting up after a small storm in the night to find out that many of the sows had panicked and there's at least a 50% mortality rate in the piglets just from the storm.  I mentioned a 5% loss in sheep farmers - here 25% is normal and expected but it can be over 50%.  When you have to go and pick up several thousand dead piglets in a morning, it's a truly awful way to start your day.

Now, a gestation crate or sow stall is different.  This isn't used for farrowing.  This is used to keep a sow caged until she farrows.  This is the crate or stall that she may spend most of her life in.  This is awful and cruel and I support the fact that they have been banned in NZ.  What was that?  Oh yes, they've already been banned (2010 I believe) to be completely phased out by the end of next year.

But somehow, a 50% piglet mortality is kinder and less cruel than a sow in farrowing crate for a couple of weeks?  I challenge that assertion in anyone who wants to make it.  What kind of twisted, sick individual can honestly accept this as truth?  How is half your piglets dead better than 1-3 weeks in a farrowing crate?  Most sows walk happily into them and lie down.  They don't have to work for their feed, they get to rest after the birth of anything up to 25 piglets and they are warm and sheltered.

I've spoken to people who believe that if a sow has plenty of room to move, in a lovely spacious shed then she won't roll on her piglets or harm them in any way.  These are again people who have no ideas of the reality.  Unlike many mammals, a sow must lie down to feed her piglets.  When the piglets have fed, they pile on top of Mum (you see this in cats too) and as close to Mum as they can get for the warmth and comfort.  It really doesn't matter how much space the sow and piglets have - they'll all be together in one small part of that space.

The second part of the issue with referring to farrowing crates as sow stalls or even as similar to sow stalls is that when you use the wrong words in your protests you are ranting about things that don't actually happen. What this does is show your ignorance which makes you someone to ignore.  It doesn't matter how well-intentioned you are or even if you're protesting something that genuinely needs to be stopped, if you're waxing lyrical over an issue like this and the words you're using aren't what you really mean, you seem to be clearly poorly educated in your issue and not worth giving air time to. 

There was a video doing the rounds of some activists breaking into a pig farm at night.  They made much of how startled and nervous the piglets were.  They showed all the rats running around.  They spoke of how awful it was to see 20 piglets cramped into such a small space.

Please tell me how someone breaking into your home and shining lights attached to video cameras in your face in the middle of the night would leave you calm and unruffled?  Please explain to me how that should be even less if it happened to your children?  Remembering that these were piglets of only a few months old.

I have heard from a fairly reliable source that the rats were released by the activists.  Truth?  I don't know.  The presence of rats however, only shows that there is adequate feed and ventilation available.  It is harder to control rats in a free-range environment and if you want to consider something a little scary, I used to buy a brand of pig pellets that the rats and mice left alone.  I didn't have to put it in tightly lidded bins or anything.  You have to wonder what could possibly be in this feed that the vermin wouldn't touch it?  If you leave poison around (even in bait stations) you run the risk of potentially poisoning your pigs.  If not from direct contact with the poison, from when they eat dead rats - and they will.  Traps are difficult with rats and can only catch one at a time.  Lots of cats and dogs is a better option, but will never keep the vermin population down to zero.

20 piglets is one litter.  This is one family of siblings, all together nice and cozy.  A sleeping room in a preschool could potentially look similar too.  Miss Eight's preschool had little cot spaces like cubby holes up the wall in the nursery.  Three layers of what were effectively baby sleeping cages.  It was a clever way to make the most of the space they had, but when I say it like that, it sounds rather terrible doesn't it?

Don't forget, as many people seem to, that the perfect end result for organisations like SAFE and PETA is that we all become vegan.  Because killing our own kind is so much better and far more ethical.  I cannot be vegetarian.  My body is built in such a way that I don't absorb iron from non-meat sources.  I quickly become very sick and anaemic, even when I'm making sure to have a healthy and balanced vegetarian diet - yes I know there is more to it than just not eating meat.

Our bodies are designed to be omnivores.  This is in our very physiology.  From the type of teeth we have and the way they are structured to our digestive system.  Having political views to make that "not for you" is one thing and that is fine.  Having a body type that remains healthy on this type of diet is another thing, and that is also fine. Telling the rest of the world that they should live unnaturally and make themselves ill for your politics or beliefs is arrogant.  Anyone who is truly sucked in to that is a prime example of Darwinism in action.

Now when there are people who are still objecting to the prices of food, who seem to treat increases in the prices of food as something completely unfair and rude that has been done to them and seem to believe they have a right to cheap food what is to be done?

"I'll eat free-range pork and eggs when they come down in price" they say.  Or "These free-range farmers are just cashing in on a fad, they're just being greedy."  But at the same time they're often the people complaining about factory farming practices.

You can't have it both ways.  Free-ranging costs more for a number of reasons. 

I do believe that free ranging is better.  I like the taste of the meat more than the factory farmed stuff.  If I can't afford to buy it (or couldn't before I moved to our block) then I would go without.

However, as long as there are people with the attitude that food should be cheap (and how dare these farmers actually be able to afford to live and pay their staff more than minimum wage?) then there will always be factory farming in one form or another.  I am not saying it's right.  I'm saying that the protests are aimed at the wrong part of the process.  This is a supply and demand thing and a disconnect from what goes into growing an animal from paddock to plate and keeping it healthy enough to become food.

If you truly want to stop factory farming, become more involved in where your food comes from.  Get your education from more balanced sources.  Visit the farms, as I have, talk to the farmers or more importantly, listen to them.  See that money is just as tight for them as it is for you.  If you want to stop it, create demand for the free-range.  Stop buying the other stuff.  Actually live by your proclaimed ideals.  Be aware that a lot of the propoganda you hear is inflated, dramatised and made to cause an emotional reaction and that there may not be as much truth in what you see than it seems on the surface.

Making Sausages

A couple of weeks ago, we had a steer homekilled.  I have so many aspects of this to write about there will be a heap of posts regarding this.

Today, however, I'm writing about sausages.  I've just spent two days making sausages, hating sausages, eating test patties and breaking things in my kitchen while making sausages. I've gotten through less than a quarter of the meat.

I'm running on about half the sleep I should have had in the last few days and have been collapsing into bed with everything hurting.  It actually became quite a vicious cycle, everything hurt to the point where I couldn't get comfortable enough to sleep, exhausted as I was, but I needed the sleep to refresh everything that hurt.

Anyway, enough of my whining.

I first tried making sausages several years ago when I found out that I was gluten intolerant.  I think it was about 7 or 8 years ago and gluten-free options were a bit thin on the ground.  I found a mincer with sausage attachment on trade me, I also found hog casing sausage skins on trade me so I started making my own gluten-free sausages.

Before becoming gluten-free, I didn't eat many sausages. In my time I've met far too many butchers who wouldn't eat their own sausages and have a tendency to tell the tales of what's really in them when they've had a few drinks.  Problem was, once I was unable to eat something then I really started to crave it.

Some of the sausages I made were lovely, some were dreadful and barely edible.  I had no idea where to even think about finding fresh pork fat - it's not something you see in the supermarket after all - so I did end up with some horribly dry attempts at sausages.  I found a few recipes that worked fine without fat - Cumberland sausages and Boudin Blanc were my favourites.  Although, one lesson I did learn is that most dry sausages taste just fine in lashings of gravy.

I threw away the last of my sausage casings about the time we moved to the farm.  They'd been in the back of the fridge for a few years and were starting to smell a bit funky.  That might have been partly because of the week or so without electricity after the earthquake.

After some discussion with the butcher for this homekill - separate from the homekill itself, he's independent - he gave me back two 20 litre buckets of meat for sausages.  For me to make the sausages myself that is.  I'm happy with this by the way, but I didn't really expect quite so much meat.

A hank (approx 90m) of hog casings in salt

I went and picked up some hog casings and a salami kit from Oskar's Butcher.  Kees is a lovely chap who is happy to talk for ages on the virtues of making your own smallgoods although he was a little horrified at how much of the offal I used for dog food rather than for smallgoods.  He emails out links and documents to all his customers that includes instructions for how to make several different cold smokers and a lot about the science of sausage making.

Soaking the casings in water

The first thing I went looking for however was recipes for sausages made purely from beef.  Most recipes contain pork as well.  Lets-Make-Sausage has a fantastic range as well as some valuable advice on sausage making.  I also loved this website - Hunter * Angler * Gardener * Cook for it's recipes, but also because some of the recipes work great for foods like bear meat and where he says venison, he is including elk, moose and other beasties that boggle a kiwi girl like me.

Kees from Oskar's Butcher also sends everyone to Wedliny Domowe -  a Polish site with a wealth of information, advice and recipes for not just sausages but almost every type of cured meat you can imagine.  The about us page is worth a look too.  I have no idea what the name translates to properly, but my limited Russian (which is often very similar to Polish) reminds me that Domovoi (close to how I think domowe from the title is pronounced) is a house spirit - similar to a Brownie from folklore, every house has one and it will only do bad things to those living in the house if they don't keep a good, neat and tidy house.

Sausage casings going on to sausage attachment

Again, I digress.

Firstly, I had to set up my meat mincer.  My benches are too thick for the clamp on the mincer, so I have to get a bit creative with this.

I also don't think it's possible to put the casings onto the attachment without a few teenage humour type jokes and innuendos, silly giggles and what not.  Yes, we all know what it looks and feels like and I think it's all right to laugh about it.

I made beef only Breakfast Sausages.  For 2kg of beef to become 30 sausages took me about 3 hours.  My little mincer was cheap.  I'm not sure if it's possible to sharpen the blades, but I think that's something we should look at.  All the stringy bits from the meat clog up the blade so it comes to a complete block and stop every second sausage.

I thought I'd try putting the meat through the food processor before I put it through the mincer.  That didn't end so well.  I have somehow broken it in such a way that the whole blade attachment will turn freely around and around on the central drive shaft (which it shouldn't do) but I can't take it off the central drive shaft.  Hubby tried and broke my favourite wooden spoon on it.

Dicing pork for sausages

Minced twice, seasoned, tested and ready for making sausages!

I've fixed that issue now.  I finely dice the meat and fat first.  I run it through the mincer, sometimes twice, without the sausage attachment.  Then I add seasonings and other stuff, test some (fried up as patties) and when I'm happy with the blend, I take the plate off the mincer before adding the sausage attachment.

The Science and Art of Sausages

Sausage making is both an art and a science.  The science is the mix that works best for sausages.  They require a minimum of 30% fresh fat.  It needs to be fresh and not cooked or rendered.  I have tried using rendered fat in my sausages - it melts very quickly and easily running out of your sausage through the holes you have pricked in the skin and leaves you with a very dry and unpleasant sausage.  Fresh fat breaks down more slowly, it keeps the sausage moist and carries the flavour.

Salt.  You may not use a lot of salt in your cooking or in your diet, but in nearly all meat dishes, it's importance cannot be overlooked.  In any cooking show on tv they are always pushing seasoning.  Season your meat, season this, season that.  For the most part, they are talking about salt.  Salt improves and enhances the flavours of your food.

Test patty cooking

It helps if you can keep the meat cold while working with it.  As with any form of butchery or working with meat that isn't cooking it. 

This is all that is really needed for sausages.  I've read a document (I'm not sure if I can share the document itself, it came with my purchases from Oskar's Butcher) in which a story is recounted.  The narrator had spent a lot of time making sausages with just the right blend of sage and thyme in them.  When he was happy with the way the herbs complemented the meat he gave some to his sausage making mentor.  "Sausage is nice," the mentor said, "but what's with all the perfume?"

To the mentor a sausage is meat, fat, salt and pepper in a hog casing.  Anything else is perfume and unnecessary.  But this is where the art comes in.  A plain sausage is fine, sometimes.  Other times I like different tastes, flavours and textures.  Different textures can come from finely mincing half the meat and only coarsely mincing the rest - as with a Kielbasa.

Kielbasa - Polish Garlic Sausage.

I look for recipes on the websites I shared earlier and anywhere I can find them.  But then I play with the blends, I taste test and quality control with patties.  Sometimes I get caught up making more patties because they're just so delicious.  One thing the patties can't do is let you know how the fat you use will go.  You can make a meat patty with a lean mince that isn't particularly dry, but using the same mince and recipe in a sausage will come out differently.

Vertical Gardening

A while back I wrote about my grey water garden.  It has gone through several incarnations, I think since Hubby got involved each has become less successful than the last, but we will get there.  Along the edge there was a cut or slipped wall of earth.  It looked dreadful, but was a fairly good spot for a garden.  It faced North and East, was sheltered from the South and West and was near where the grey water came out.

I came up with the idea of building a stepped retaining wall type thing along there with tyres.  Inside the tyres I would grow veges.  It would be a great place to move some of the strawberries that were threatening to take over every available spot in my other vege garden.  I would also fill some of these tyres with the large amount of stones we have and make them into steps leading down to this area.

Hubby couldn’t ‘see’ it.  I drew a picture, he kind of got it, but not really.  He’d brought most of the tyres he’d found up to a spot very close to where I wanted to do it, so I just started to do it.  I’ve spent months on and off, working at it.  I’ve filled tyres and gaps beneath the tyres with weeds, lawn clippings, pig and chook poo - every organic scrap you can think of.

 

 

I didn’t realise just how many stones are needed to fill a tyre.  That’s been quite a mission.  It took a few tyres before I realised that I really needed to make sure I also filled the rims of the tyres.  It can be quite disconcerting to have them move under you when you step up or down.  It got to the stage where anyone going down the paddocks would pick up an armload of rocks and stones on their way back up to toss into the tyres.

We opened up a new patch for the pigs and for some reason they dug this bit over - something they hadn’t done anywhere else.  This gave us plenty of easily accessible rocks and stones, but also a great patch to plant spuds.

 

The tyres I hadn’t used yet - although I haven’t finished building my wall - were getting to be a nuisance, so I made three ‘pyramids’ from some of them.  A 3 x 3 square on the bottom, 2 x 2 on the next layer and one in the middle on the top.  I filled these with pig poo and the fallen oak leaves from their paddock and threw a handful of pumpkin seed in each tyre.  In one I used watermelon seed.  Only two plants have come up in that one, but (I’m guessing through the pig poo) we have a couple of tomato plants popping up there too.  They’ve been simple but effective.  The pumpkin plants have been doing reasonably well, we have more than we expected so Hubby is keen to start more. 

 

He pointed out that (when we buy it) a bag of pig nuts is between $25 and $30.  This seed has cost us nothing as it came from last year’s pumpkins and the pigs love pumpkin.  The cattle will also eat it.

He also now loves the tyre wall and is helping me to work on it.  I noticed that I keep getting big healthy grass and weeds come up along the front at the bottom.  They can be quite a challenge to pull out and they drop seed all through my tyres.  So I decided we needed a path in front of the tyres.  We’d found plenty of weed-matting in all the crap piles and sheds and there was probably a couple of trailer loads worth of small rounded stones in a paddock.  I found that quite by accident - it was overgrown with sorrel and grass.

The hard thing about that is the soil we’re digging up for the path.  It’s clay with a disproportionate amount of stones.  It’s taken at least 6 hours so far to get about 4 metres along.  First it needs loosening with a pickaxe/grubber type tool.  Then I’m screening what we’ve dug.  The soil and small stones are going into tyres for veges, the weeds are going into a compost drum and the bigger stones are going into step tyres.

 

Pumpkin Pyramid

All the organic material that has been going in is settling too.  It’s an ongoing thing to top up the tyres with fresh soil and compost and try to keep them going.  I don’t think this is a project that will be finished any time in the near future, but we’ll get there eventually.

Although chances are, by the time it’s nearly finished, Hubby will have a new grand scheme and want to pull it all down and start again!

One Man's Trash ...

One big bonus with our little block (that at the same time seems to be a huge pain in the proverbial) is the amount of well, crap that was left lying around.

We’ve cleared sheds that were chock full of “other people’s treasures” and found more and more just lying around the place.
 

Hubby gets on a big neat binge every now and then and goes through it all, sorting and tidying while trying to be hard and throw away what isn’t going to maybe be useful someday.  We’ve found leftover rolls of chicken wire - mostly in 2 metre lengths that did get used in the chook run after I spent a painful and painstaking day tying all the bits together.  Bits of sheep-fencing mesh, one I found when it blew against a fence from Gods know where and my darling heifer Brownie got her head stuck through it.  Poor girl, I guess we were both lucky that she is so tame and didn’t panic when I was untangling her head and horns from three or four layers of fencing.

Some of the irrigation hosing (as far as we can tell it’s been partially set up but never used) has been useful, some of it has perished or been damaged by animals.  There are jets and sprayers and bits of every imaginable type and level of usefulness.

Pipes, tanks, tubs and hoses galore.  Enough corrugated iron to build a chookhouse and to go around the pigs.

And tyres.  So many tyres.  Every so often, Hubby gathers up more from the various spots we’ve found them.  I would have assumed that there was a huge silage pile at some stage, if only they’d all been remotely near each other.

We try to make use of these bits as much as we can.  We don’t have a lot of spare income and we do have a lot of grand ideas.  Being resourceful with this stuff is also part of our self-sufficient philosophy.  Why buy stuff new if we can make the old stuff work for a while?  Although the gates held shut with baling twine are a very temporary measure - especially since we’ve found the steers figured out which bit to pull on to open the gate!  Might have to go to proper knots rather than slip knots for a while.

Hubby also started to bring home pallets from work for firewood.  Every so often he’ll spend a day with the skill saw cutting up pallets and filling the woodshed.  It only takes a day or two to fill our small wood shed.  Although, with the storm a few months back, we have probably enough macrocarpa drying for at least one winter.

The pallets have turned out to be useful in so many other ways too.  I know there are plenty of sustainable living websites that show ways to make furniture out of them, but we’ve used them for pig fencing, building compost bins and some are being pulled to bits to make a bench seat around the deck.

For me it is a point of pride to be making useful stuff around here out of what would otherwise be rubbish.  I love that we didn’t need to buy a single thing to be able to build two chookhouses.  The only purchases for the farrowing shed were the electrical components.  We still have a number of projects in mind and the first place we look is at the crap pile!