The Mobile Home Woman | Our journey from urban homesteading to rural homesteading at Windhaven farm…

Oh, piglet time will soon be here…

Posted on September 10, 2013 by MobymomSeptember 10, 2013

By our reckoning, Miss Ebony still has about 3 weeks left before the first possible due date of our little American Guinea Hogs!

But, by golly, she’s getting huge already!

Pigs are that way, so we’ve heard, learned and read about… still, I didn’t expect her to be quite so big at what is really about the half, to two thirds point of her pregnancy!

She is sharing a pen with Oscar… he’s getting quite portly as well! Or should I say porkly! I suppose he’s gaining sympathy weight. Or it’s just all the good pumpkins and other harvest treats that are coming their way!

Maggie is working on our big pig/chicken expansion/moving project. We are going to be moving our chicken flock closer to the house, to the big poultry barn near the garden. It’s a bigger coop, and a bigger run and it’s easier to light and keep an eye on against coons and such. And closer to the dog yard, which seems to be a bit of a deterrent as well.

Once that is done, hopefully, by this weekend, then we will begin to remodel the lil’ coop to become the lil’ nursery for our momma to be and her little piglets! We are going to remove all the chicken things, like the roost and nest boxes, then clean it all out… It has a cement floor which is nice for pigs (no rooting inside!) We are going to paint it a nice bright white to help with natural light and then fix up the door and inside hog panel fencing. We will also be enclosing the whole outside yard with hog panel to keep everyone in and all the bad guys out! (Little American Guinea Hogs are pretty small when they are young! Easily dragged off if not protected!) Miss Ebony will have a deluxe little 10 x 10 foot house as well as a nice big outside yard for her soon to be little gang of piglets!!! We just can’t wait!

If you’re within driving distances of the farm and you’re interested in reserving a piglet or two, please let me know… Our plan is to keep a few and sell a few, and hopefully to find the boar of Miss Ebony’s dreams to come and live with her too! Probably after her little bacon bits are weanlings!!! Our pigs are purebred, registered and pedigreed American Guinea Hogs… Awesome little homestead pigs for sure! Slow growers, but easy keepers and feeders… and gourmet quality meat! Great temperaments and just all around awesome heritage hogs!!! You can contact me at: sherri@chekal.com

In the meanwhile… we’re just counting the days and can’t wait to meet our first home grown litter of piglets soon! My guess is October 16th… what’s yours? (Remember the absolutely first due date possible is September 29th….)

Pin It

Making Tortillas!

Posted on September 10, 2013 by MobymomSeptember 10, 2013

For some time now, I’ve wanted to try and make tortillas! Everywhere I read that they are pretty simple. After all, they are the basic bread staple of many South American families without fancy equipment and materials. I think they are really like many cultures basic fry breads. Simple, no leavening, yeast or fancy waiting times.

Now, true tortillas use lard for their recipes. Good old fashioned lard. If you don’t have lard, you can use butter. Or even oil. I’ve heard that some folks will use shortening, but from what I read, that’s really a sort of last ditch, oh my gosh, what can we use we need tortillas NOW, sort of option. I’m not sure why and I’m pretty sure someone will tell me why and or mention that their grandma always used shortening and they were just fine.

We used butter because we were fresh outta lard.

Actually, I have to admit, I don’t think I’ve EVER bought or gotten lard in my whole entire life. I’m not really sure what I would use it for.

No, wait, I take that back. I have a small package of leaf lard in my freezer from our first hog!!! Everyone said that is the most wonderful, beautiful lard that you can get from a pig. So I asked for it and then promptly forgot about it. I should probably dig that out. Maybe in a few days.

However, I digress.

Here is the simple recipe that we used.

2 cups flour
1 cup milk
2 tbsps lard/butter/oil/shortening
1 tsp salt (We used sea salt because we really like that stuff!)

That’s it folks.

Cut the lard into your flour and salt. Slowly add the milk until you get a nice kinda thick ball as you are stirring it up. Don’t overthink it. It’s just simple. I used a fork to smash the butter into the flour, just like how I make a pie crust. And then just sort of whipped it all up. It was easy.

Then turn the lump onto a floured board and knead it for a minute or two. Nothing too crazy, just enough to get it nice and ready. You can then cut it into about 8 to 10 balls. Roll them up and let them set for about 20 minutes. You can just rush and cook them, but if you give them a brief rest, they really seem to be a little more poofyier.

(I wonder why my spell checker doesn’t like poofyier… Hmmm….)

Once they rested a wee bit, you just get your skillet/griddle/pan ready.

And get this… you really don’t need to do anything to your heating surface. If it’s nice and well seasoned, like a cast iron pan, you can just flop that bad boy down and 30 seconds later, flip it for another 30 seconds and poof! You got tortillas!

However, our electric griddle needed just a wee spray of oil olive Pam to make the tortillas really nice and have a touch of color as they cooked.

All you do is heat it up, pretty hot… sizzley hot… and then roll that ball out thin and just flop it on there. Be ready, it will puff up and bubble a bit… We really found it was good to have a roller-outer person and a flipper-gal. Our first ones were a little misshapen. Clearly we had not gotten the whole art of rolling out a nice tortilla. They were a wee bit too thick, too. Almost more like a pita or something.

They tasted awesome, so it was okay.

However, as you can clearly see, our fifth and sixth were getting very nice! Look at the size of that one on the right there! Man, was the roller-outter gal doing a bang up job! (if I might say so myself….)

It really didn’t take that long. And in fact, we were done cooking all dozen that we made in like under 10 minutes? After we were done, we laid them on a plate and stashed them in the microwave, just to stay warm as we finished up our cooking. We had a pair of nice little ribeye steaks, so we just cut them thin and fried them on the griddle with a touch of butter and a little garlic seasoning. Simple and fast, really. The girls liked theirs with just steak wrapped up. I added a little of my sweet pepper salsa for a really good quick meal! I wanted green beans or maybe some refried beans and rice as a side but I got voted off the island for good old corn. Oh well, the steak rollups were so darn good, I couldn’t really complain!

Well, another thing off the bucket list of going homemade! I believe we will do this again, for sure… it was easy, pretty fun and the taste… oh my gosh, so so much better than store bought! Just fresh, warm and wonderful. I think they would be good brushed with a little butter and a sprinkle of cinnamon and sugar! Or with some good Mexican cheese and rolled up to dip in salsa! Or hey, how about just rolled up later with some lunch meat and all, like a wrap sandwich! Oh, the possibilities!!!

Give these a try, you will really enjoy them!

Pin It

Goats in the Road…

Posted on September 6, 2013 by MobymomSeptember 6, 2013

Adventures in Farming #683
Goats on the Road!!!

I’m happily working on my computer when I look out my little window that points eastward and I see Daisy leading the rest of the goats and at least one or two sheep out to to cross the road. I smile and then pure panic sets in! THE ROAD? LOOSE!!! My brain immediately imagines the scene like the picture above and I scream to Jessy in her office “THE SHEEP ARE LOOSE” (And of course feel bad because it’s mostly the GOATS that are loose……) And she leaps to her feet and dashes out the front door to herd and I get to my feet and grab my shoes and a bag of stale frosted mini-wheats (the favorite livestock crack treat of the moment), and bolt cutters and dash out the back door to hollar for Maggie to get the remaining critters back into the garden.

Jessy manages to get them BACK off the road by shaking the little green apple tree by my window and they all run over to start stuffing their faces with this treat. The cars and trucks resume their journey, hopefully pleased with the thought of sharing a funny story with friends and family when they get home tonight.

Maggie has the rest inside the middle yard and the garden closed off. She has seen where they pushed out a section of the garden fence on the east and she has pulled it up and pushed it tight against a chair! Garden is closed for the season, it seems. The little boogers weren’t content with all they had, no….. they had to go and wreck it for everyone else. And I’m pretty sure it was Daisy who made the connection. She’s small and cute and sickly-sweet, just like some criminal mastermind.

“Hey guys, look! You can push under this fence like me! Lets go on a walkabout!”

I have to cut loose a big section of the dog yard fence from the posts so we can lift up the fence and lure the 4 goats and Angus, the sheep, back into captivity. Of course, Daisy and Buttercup rush over to my side, because they love me and they love the bag of frosted mini wheats I’m carrying. Rana and Rafeka consider it a moment, but then, naaa…. they would rather eat the leaves and apples that are all over this un-touched Eden that is the yard in front of the dog yard that we have to mow because it’s not fenced in yet. Jessy grabs Angus because he’s clearly a little befuddled by all the headyness of running with a bad gang of goats. She grabs him by the horns and shoves him under the fence with the skill of a tough life long bull-dodger at a western rodeo. (Can I just say that I’m really impressed at how far my daughters have come in their no-nonsense approach to livestock handling??? Jessy is one tough operator when it comes down to livestock safety… no one gets by her!)

Maggie has the dog yard gate open and is trying to keep the rest of the flock from rushing in. They are baaaaaing and going nuts because they think it’s cruel and unusal punishment that those BAD Hoofies are getting mini wheats when they deserve them FAR MORE for staying in place. I shove the goatie girls in the gate and have to lure Angus with a few more treats as he is on to us about the horn grabbing that he just had to endure. Just as I shove his butt through the fence, Jessy calls that the angoras are behind me, suddenly seperated from everyone and wanting a treat. Mission accomplished… everyone back in the fold.

I was really impressed with our response time on this livestock emergency run. Only about 10 minutes max, everyone safe, and only a few pieces of wire cut to release a part of the fence. No swearing, no injuries, and we’re actually laughing at the whole situation’s end. Are we getting good at this stuff or what! A year ago, it would have been chaos as we tried to herd them around the front of the house or back in the field or down the farm access road in a panic, without any treats or thought of how to get them back in. We are actually getting much better at this all!

Finally!!!

Add better fencing to the garden for next year’s to do list.

Consider chaining Daisy in the paddock for this year’s list.

(haha…. naw, she’s too cute…)

Pin It