Sweet and Sour Maple Venison

Compile in a good heavy pan:

4T cooking oil
2T butter
1 large coarsely chopped onion
1 large clove garlic finely chopped
* Optional: a little lovage if you have it/celery if you don't

Saute until onions begin to turn clear

Add:

A couple of pounds of venison stew meat

Saute until brown

Toss in:

Italian seasoning to taste
*Optional: A little more garlic
* Optional: A tiny pinch of salt

Dump on:

1/4 C vinegar
1/4 C maple syrup
1/4 C Ketchup

When all ingredients are nice and brown and bubbly and the house begins to smell really, really good,

Add:

Two or three cups of water.

Seal the pot tightly with foil or a good, tight-fitting lid, and cook in a 325 degree oven until the meat is fork tender and succulent.

Around here that is for about as long as milking and chores take.
Anywhere normal it would probably be around 2 1/2-3 hours, more or less. Take care that it doesn't cook dry as the "gravy" is the best part.

Serve over rice or potatoes.

****This recipe is a happy accident I came up with the other day while working on 1001 ways to cook venison when your freezer is full of deers and you are out of beef. We really liked it and hope you will too.

Objects in the Mirror

Lately I have been cooking mostly wild game and the odds and ends of past beeves and porkers, dug out of the back of the freezer and turned into unexpected things, which are (amazingly) pretty darned good. Those gristly shank bones...a little vinegar, some spices and some time in the oven and they become the basis for soup or chili that is hard to beat.
And I never made turkey soup before. Turns out I'm not too bad at it.

Applesauce from the Winesap tree that Grandma Peggy kept. The apples have always been terrible, mealy, harsh, bitter, blah. This year I left them on the tree until this week. Who knew that they are a variety that needs some good hard frosts to flavor up? They are fantastic! And not a worm in the bunch. I am going to get out the shepherd's crook and shake down the few that are still hanging on.....before the chickens get them


One pound of sausage that was hidden behind the ice cubes, sauteed with onion, garlic and lovage, topped with a can of green beans and a big bunch of instant mashed potatoes, whipped up with an egg, some grated Parmesan and garlic powder....bake for an hour and a half and get out of the way, they will be back for seconds.


Just around the corner is deer season. The hunter in chief is also the guy who cuts up the deer with me. He took meat cutting class in college last semester. That should help us turn any that he gets into a better product for better dining. Now I just hope that he is successful.

MPC's Getting Noticed in the Mainstream Media

Salt Rising Bread

How many of you western NY folks are familiar with it?

Do you like it?

Around here if you have Montgomery blood having someone bring back a loaf (or two) from Hornell is like Christmas, Thanksgiving and the 4th of July rolled into one.
And one of those wonderful brothers I have and his lovely wife, did just that day before yesterday.
After a brief meeting at the bottom of our washed out canyon of a driveway, Alan conveyed the precious loaves to the kitchen where we looked on in wonder.

We have had salt rising bread for breakfast
Supper
Snacks
General occasions of irresistibilty.
There is still some left......maybe I should hide it.

More Chuck Jolley

This week Mr. Jolley interviews Kevin Murphy about anti-agriculture activism and what response farmers can offer. As are many of Mr. Jolley's articles, this one is worth taking time to read.

Do You Want the Good News First?

Gillibrand maintains stance on cow flatulence tax.

Or the bad news?

A good friend of the family is interviewed in this article on potentially disastrous new farm labor laws in NY. By good friend I am talking the kind of guy who showed up to feed cows for weeks when the boss had an emergency appendectomy before the kids were old enough to work.

Or perhaps the really insanely horrible news? FDA may inspect right down to the farm level and call foods from farms that don't comply adulterated.

As if farms weren't already inspected half to death. And as if most food recalls didn't originate at the plant level, not at the farm. I hope people wake up quickly to this one, because it is going to cost everybody who eats a lot of money and add a layer of government that won't be cheap either.

Still More Melamine in Chinese Products

This is pretty frightening. Our family is buying less and less prepared food these day...not that we bought a lot anyhow, but I am reading labels more carefully all the time.

I honestly started feeling (and writing about) concern about the Chinese dairy industry years ago, when they were buying up registered Holstein cows locally. I remember reading the editor of a certain dairy magazine that serves our area crowing joyfully about exporting heifers and thinking that what might have looked good at the time would come to roost later. China's exported apples have virtually devastated the apple industry in some states. They have no quality standards, but cheap prices are a strong lure. At the time of the Chinese cattle buying expedition I expected that nation to flood the world market with cheap dairy products hurting US dairymen. I had no idea that instead they would export poison in dairy food form.

In this article the Chinese government admits that melamine adulteration of feeds and food products is commonplace there. I suspect that we have only just begun to see the scope of the problem.

Livestock Contribution to Global Warming

Probably isn't as bad as even the least of the doom sayers think. Seems the folks who blame cows are including deforestation in the Amazon in their figures. Personally....there were a lot of ruminants on this continent (think so many bison that they shook the earth and took hours to pass) when we got here. They all ruminated then and there was no excess of warmth.


***If you are wondering what I am doing making so many posts in one day...well, I just finished making apple jelly and you know how it is...you deserve a break today and all. Plus I dumped a jar on the counter, burning all the fingers on my left hand so...(but you notice I can still type...it hurts but anything for the cause.)

Anyhow the apple pie jelly was a success. I had people coming out of the rafters to taste it as soon as I had the foam skimmed off. I couldn't find the allspice so I just added a little cinnamon and nutmeg, but the result sure is a lot better than plain apple. I will do this again. As soon as I get more sugar, more apples and my fingers feel better.

******PS, Florida Cracker mentioned Picasa 3 in his post today. I have been using 2 for quite a while, but I downloaded 3 to try it. All I can say is WOW! Lots better. Lots

JBS Swift fires Muslim workers

I was really surprised by this development. Companies seemed to be bowing to worker pressure to change the rule in the workplace, then this popped up in the news yesterday. Swift is a Brazilian-owned mega company, one of five-ish that controlls most of the beef in this country. It is attempting to buy out two of the other major players, a deal which, if completed, will concentrate sales in very few hands.

A good one from Terry Etherton

Here is his take on some of the unsound science being used to convince people that conventional food is somehow lacking.

Homegrown Dinner

This is last night's supper just before it went into the oven before milking. It was done when we came in and, alas, eaten before I thought to take the "after" photo.

Everything involved was homegrown except the celery, vinegar, some garlic powder (didn't plant any last fall) and a dash of Italian seasoning. It was so much fun to assemble that I can scarcely call it work. The first potatoes of the year, two plants worth, were dug fresh from the bed behind the house and the big sheep pen garden the guys made me this year. One plant was started from some leftover sprouting potatoes that we bought to eat from the supermarket. The other was from seed potatoes we bought to plant. Oddly enough the supermarket hill yielded perfect orbs of potato goodness. The ones from certified seed potatoes were covered with potato scab.
Go figure. Didn't matter anyhow; they were all delicious, but I will dig the scabby ones first before they get too nasty.
Digging potatoes is kind of like treasure hunting to me. You never know what will come out of each hill and the anticipation is worth the sweat.

The carrots are rainbow carrots from Pinetree Garden Seeds. They are simply the best variety we have ever tried and I don't bother with anything else now. I grow them in half 15-gallon acid barrels from the milk house, in a mixture of sand, plain old dirt and compost. They thrive. I love the wet paint scent of a carrot fresh out of the ground....kind of fond of the taste too and not all the ones I pulled made it into the dinner. We are speculating about bringing a clean half barrel indoors this winter and trying to grow some like we do the indoor lettuce. Seems like we can never get enough of them.

The stew beef (I bake stew beef this way when I run out of chuck roast...turns out real tasty and tender) is from that Calbret HH Champion bull I bought the boss for Father's Day a couple of years ago....the one who didn't pass his blood test from the Holstein Association because somebody goofed on his dam's sire. Hated to eat such a well bred animal, but we couldn't use him as intended because the maternal grandsire was Ocean View Extra Special, a bull we used very heavily ourselves. (Right now in my first ten cows there are five by him, Bariole, Bubbles, Camry, Junie and Lemonade.) When we draw a bull of our own to use AI, it needs to be at least somewhat unrelated to most of the animals in the herd. This was just too close bred for comfort.

Anyhow, homegrown is kind of a favorite brand around here and the leftovers were pretty sparse. Now I can't wait for an excuse to dig more potatoes.

How about this story

GIPSA Alleges Swift and Company, d/b/a Swift Beef Company Violated the Packers and Stockyards Act

Strawberry rhubarb 3.14159

Another good thing about June...
(It's Dairy Month, but it is also berry month)

And....does anyone have any idea what this flower is? Alan's best friend's mom gave me one years ago and I shared with my folks. Mine died a long time ago but I liberated this one from their lawn last fall. It is finally in bloom and I am hoping you can help me with an identification. Otherwise I am going to have to keep calling it **their last name** flower...which confuses folks mightily.
Thanks in advance.

Pete Hardin makes the NYT

I met Mr. Hardin a few years ago at a dairy meeting and found him likable and fascinatingly well-informed about perhaps the murkiest topic in town, milk marketing. He is well-known in the dairy industry for thinking for himself and for not bowing to conventional wisdom just to run with the herd. He also has a lot of theories about the tangled web of milk marketing and pricing that many people pooh-pooh, because they at first seem so outlandish. (Like water buffalo milk in imported milk from India.....) However, pretty much every time you read something in his publication, The Milkweed, you later find out that it is true. Now he is featured in an article in the New York Times.
If you have the remotest interest in what is and has been going on in the dairy industry for the past decade, (much to the detriment of most dairy farmers), read this article. It simplifies some very complicated issues impressively well. Milk pricing laws and formulas, the way it is marketed, and the structure of the big so-called "farmer" cooperatives are staggeringly complicated...about as transparent as a puddle of crude oil. It is amazing to see a publication like the Times reduce these topics to a comfortably clear denominator.


Here is a link to one of Mr. Hardin's articles on the situation (caution large pdf)




It is a relief to see these issues, which have supplied farmers with a nightmarish dilemma of where to sell their milk when the big boys come to town, and how to make a living on less than the cost of production, brought to mainstream attention. Maybe it will do some good.

Argentine food crisis

Kinda, sorta big news, but I don't see anything about it in the mainstream press.

James and the Giant......

Errr.....I mean Becky and the giant......egg. This egg was laid by Chick Pea, Becky's Buff Orpington hen. She only lays about one a week, but these massive double yolkers max out our old fashioned egg scale. On the electronic scale they each come out to 3.7 ounces, a full 1.2 ounces larger than a jumbo egg.

Been saying this all along

Foot and mouth plan used flawed study.

I have been writing in the Farm Side about this since the short list of possible sites was first announced and they were all inland. So have some other bloggers and a few news folks. I still can't believe that our trusty government wants to put a lab exploring deadly and highly infectious cattle diseases right in the middle of cattle country. Can anybody say disaster looking for (and finding) a place to happen?

More on the DFA fund transfer issue

From Dairy Today.

Other links: Dairy Alert
Letter (pdf) from management

MIlk-it does a body good

Here is the kind of story I like to read in the main stream media...rather than blather from anti-food activists that is.

HT to World Dairy Diary

An animal disease lab

In the middle of animal country. That is what is being proposed here in the USA right now. (I wrote about this in the Farm Side a long time ago. Wish the paper was a free site so you could read it.) It seems absolutely nuts to me to put an animal virus research lab containing live viruses, with the potential to kill off every cow, sheep and goat in the country, in the middle of farm and ranch land. An accidental release of animal virus would most likely result in a devastating mess. During a simulation of what might occur should foot and mouth disease virus escape into the the American cattle population the end result was food shortages so severe there was rioting in the streets and so many cattle killed that the National Guard ran out of bullets."In the exercise, the government said it would have been forced to dig a ditch in Kansas 25 miles long to bury carcasses."

Our existing lab, Plum Island, which is located off Long Island, is said not to be secure enough so a new lab must be built. (We put men on the moon, others in orbit and we can't make our existing facility secure enough? Doesn't make much sense to me.) However, even if a new lab is required, putting it in Kansas (where last time I looked there are an awful lot of cows) seems insane. Great Britain found out just last year that accidental virus release can and will happen. I am behind those in Congress who want some more research done before this decision is finalized.