Hello February 2017

So let's just let a snowy wind blow away my missing week or two. Have you seen the snow outside? My goodness it is almost 2 feet deep! The chickens are not impressed. The children on the other hand are thrilled.

I am thrilled to say that I did in fact keep our grocery budget as well as every other budget we set. So this post is going to be a purely a goal update but I promise to get back to delicious recipes very soon.

Sausage, Beans and Goals

Sorry I missed you last week. I got knocked down by a terrible head cold. When I finally started to feel human around Thursday, it was just in time to cook and clean for L2's birthday. So now that I am feeling better, I am playing a bit of catch up. Thankfully the weather has been lovely so the kids haven't been under foot while I do laundry and dishes. The quiet house has given me some unexpected and welcome time to enjoy The Dave Ramsey show with minimal interruptions.

If you have never listened to his show, or read any of his books (I am currently reading The Total Money Makeover), his show is definitely inspirational. It has been inspiring me to continue working our budget without coming up with creative ways to cheat or talk myself out of it. For now though, I have been sticking to all our goals.

Happy 2017!

Oh my goodness it is a new year already. I have spent the last couple of months thinking, oh I need to post this amazing (insert whatever I just made, pie, cookie, etc.) recipe! Only to look down and there is nothing left to take a picture of. Optimistically I then think, oh I will make it again this weekend and write down my changes and take pictures... can you guess what happens? No? Seriously? Okay, I know you know. Anyway, the holidays flew by and now it's the start of the new year, again. So many little changes and big goals are racing around in my mind. It can be rather overwhelming to think about all the things I want to get done. A year is a long time and yet, it is only a year.

Spending the Day in the Kitchen?

Despite one of my more recent posts, I have been hesitant to post. First off, there has been a big change in how we spend our days: we have officially started homeschooling. It is a deeply personal choice, and while it might not be for everyone, it is definitely what is best for our family right now. Needless to say, we have been spending more of our time learning/teaching reading and cursive writing as well as enjoying tons of living books; today it was Seeker of Knowledge, last week it was Over in the Wetlands, this week we will continue to explore monarchs with Hurry and the Monarch and Monarch and Milkweed as we watch for them as the days grow colder and shorter. I digress. This is not a homeschooling blog and I am planning on keeping it separate (leave me a comment below if you can think of a good title for our homeschool!). This space has been for me. A place to write about cooking and gardening and other fun aspects of our organic lifestyle.

Old Log Inn Bar Soap

Spring is coming. It is time for planning, planting, and cleaning. One of the things I need to clean out are all the drafts of articles I started to write but never got to finish. Today, I want to tell you about some amazing local soap I have been using for almost a year: Old Log Inn Naturals.

I discovered them at the farmer's market last year and have been hooked. At first I enjoyed the Peppermint and some other scents. Then I found her Honeysuckle and Plumeria. After that, I only use this soap and Dr. Bronner's Organic Unscented Baby Soap.

Grandma's Pegs Clothespins

Do you hang you laundry out to dry? Every website will tell you that this is one of the easiest ways to save money and it makes your laundry smell great. What a lot of websites don't talk about is what you should use to hang your laundry. I know that sounds funny and you are probably thinking, um, duh, a clothes line and some clothes pins, right? Here's the thing, if you use cheap or poorly made clothes pins a lot of your laundry could end up on the ground. Laundry that you have to rewash because it fell in the mud or dirt (or chicken poop) is bound to discourage even the most frugal. I know it drove me crazy last summer so last fall and this spring I have been searching for the best way to keep clothes on the line.

Liebster Award

I received an exciting message on Jan 1st from Coco at homeschoolapalooza stating that she had nominated me for a Liebster award! Wow!  Thank you so much Coco! 

 

The Liebster Award is an award that is by bloggers, for bloggers. It’s passed from person to person to encourage connection and support within our writing community, and to aid in the discovery of new and upcoming bloggers.

A New Year Beginning

Happy New Year. May this year be filled with wonderful thing for you and the ones that you love. Over here at The Messy Organic Mum things will be changing a little bit too. For those of you who read about the delicious Cinnamon Rolls,  you know that along with the holidays, I also got some pretty intense information: my contract for my part-time work from home gig was not going to be renewed. While our family will miss the monthly paycheck, we can live off just my husband's. This has actually provided me some relief. The twenty hours a week that I was working can now be focused on our growing family, our small homestead and getting our lives a little more organized. While we all have 24 hours in the day, we all use it differently. I am looking forward to using my time differently.

We've Gone Solar

First let me apologize again from my extended absence. Thank you to all you fantastic readers who have continued to visit and email me. The last six weeks have been a whirlwind for us. As I wrote in my review of Squeasy gear, we were all quite sick. I was also sick, not just with whatever the kids so wonderfully picked up and shared but also with morning sickness. We are very excited, although I am also still incredibly nauseous and exhausted. I am just under 12 weeks so we are still pretty early but that hasn't stopped my body from reacting to all the hormones flowing around inside me. Thankfully my stomach, although very unhappy, tends to hold its contents. The exhaustion though has been hard and I am afraid that this website has taken a bit of a backseat to every day tasks and extra sleep. If little E would stop spending her nights awake (new teeth?), it might also help. So again, thank you for all your continued support while I am not being as diligent as I ought to be.

In other great news, we got solar panels installed this summer. They were turned on in August but we have had a number of inspection from electrical and building to our final state inspection this week. So here we are:

Go Vote

First let me apologize for being completely dark and silent for the past month. I will share my exciting news with you in the next post. Today though, please take a few minutes out of your day to go and vote. I do not care which way you vote, which candidate or which party. Please just vote.
Every vote matters. If it didn't matter, women wouldn't have the right to vote, there wouldn't be public schools , food assistance or civil rights. Each vote counts. And if you won't vote for yourself, please vote because of all the men and women who are currently willing to die at home and abroad to protect your right to vote. Happy Voting.

For those of you on your way or just getting back, here is a cute video I saw recently that made me smile. If nothing else, it gets people talking about voting.

Kevin’s Quality Clothespins Review

First let me tell you, this weekend is all about reviews. I have come across some interesting things that make my life a little better and this weekend I am going to share them with you. Let me start with a small confession (okay two confessions): I prefer clothes that have been hung on the line but I hate hanging them. Seriously, there are times I just don't wash a load of clothes because I don't want to hang them! Go ahead and call me the lazy mum of the year. I won't take offence (much).

The way we dry clothes (yes we have a dryer) is by putting them on the line in the sun during the summer and by putting them on a clothes drying rack next to the woodstove in the winter. During the summer, I have no problems hanging the towels and sheets and other large objects on the line. It is the small baby clothes that take two clothes pins per tiny piece of clothing. I need 100 or more to hang two loads! During the winter though, those little clothes all fit nicely on the drying rack and they dry nice and quickly. The towels and sheets and blankets though all take forever to dry and take up loads of space. So there you have it, my mini-rant on laundry.

Naturally Hip Cloth Pads

After using cloth diapers for the two kids, I began to think about cloth pads for me. I perused the Internet and green sites trying to find some recommendations. Most of the recommendations seems very nice but very few used organic fabrics. I finally stumbled across Naturally Hip's Etsy shop.

Always Organic?

Have you read the many articles about how expensive it is to eat only organically? I have. They are numerous and everywhere. I have read many blogs about how people are stupid for believing in organic food and other products. I have read articles about costs and the hassles.

While I work very hard to make sure our home is filled with organic food and natural products, I have to stay within a budget same as the next family. The grocery budget is not an issue and so far (since Oct 2013) we have been successful at keeping our monthly grocery bill under $200 a month - that includes the cost of our dairy CSA but not the cost of chicken feed for our eggs.
Frugality though is something I struggle with. Have you ever been on Pinterest? There are some amazing pins about fun things to do with kids, such as sensory bins. When I make them for the kids though, I am torn: do I buy organic items?

Cree Indian Proverb

While browsing Green Grandma's site this evening, I came across this beautiful quote that reminded me of all the reasons I strive to be green, without ever mentioning the words "global warming" or "climate change".

Only when the last tree has died
and the last river been poisoned
and the last fish been caught
will we realize we cannot eat money.

-- Cree Indian Proverb

December 2013 Update

I had planned to write an update in November however during my last month of pregnancy, I am not exactly sure where the time went.

My 100 Things Challenge went really well and I have been trying, especially with the holidays coming, to make sure that anything that comes into our house is something we really want, need or can't live without.

100 Things

As the holiday season draws near, here we are excited for a couple reasons: the end of gardening for the year, a possibility to curl up beside the warm wood stove and between Thanksgiving and Christmas, we are expecting another baby.

The joy I feel that gardening and canning is coming to an end might be because I am 28 weeks pregnant but I know myself. The reality is that by the end of September I am ready for a break from tomatoes and apples and beans and all the other little gardening chores that seemed great until I was overwhelmed by them. Although I haven't written our apples galore article, we have been inundated and at least two trees haven't even started to drop their green and red globes of deliciousness.

As the season slowly draws to a close, I start spending the evenings reading about all the things I might want to do next year. We spend more time at the library, pouring over books and guides and different non-fiction books.

Of the 27 books I currently have checked out, last night I picked up The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul

The Writings of Jenna Woginrich

Late one night, I relaxed in bed with my fiance at my parent's house reading Mother Earth News. The house I had bought a year and half earlier was under structural and functional construction. While working on it, we were living in my old bedroom at my parent's house. Tucked into bed, I read an article called Life on the Homestead. I didn't notice the author. I didn't really care who it was because reading it, it could be anyone, including me. I read the article aloud to my fiance. He wasn't as impressed or moved by the article as I was. I dog eared it and read it again a few nights later. I would be willing to bet that I still have that magazine with the dogeared page.

Years later I would read an excerpt from a book called Made from Scratch and get so excited that I would literally leap out of my computer chair to tell my husband about the book I had just found by the same author, Jenna Woginrich, who had written the article from Mother Earth News a few years ago. He, of course, had no idea what I was talking about. I though, was over the moon. The woman who I had felt so connected with through her writings, had written a book. Not just any book, but from the looks of Amazon, a book that told her story and gave me practical information I could use on our small homestead. I promptly requested it from the library, along with her other works, Barnheart and Chick Days.

Real Life Wednesday

As I have said before, I am a huge fan of picklebums and her Real Life Wednesdays always crack me up. This weeks was no exception, and had some lovely pictures and it reminded me that even though life yesterday was exciting, I hope it isn't an ordinary day...

January Reading

This month is always busy but it is also the darkest, meaning I try to read as much as possible. Here are the titles on my bookshelf this month:

Made From Scratch

 

Homegrown and Handmade

 

Make The Bread, Buy The Butter

 

Free-Range Chicken Gardens: How to Create a Beautiful, Chicken-Friendly Yard

 

Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World

 

The Feast Nearby

 

Poor Girl Gourmet: Eat in Style on a Bare Bones Budget

 

The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food, and Love

 

For those of you who just looked over the books and thought, well then, she has a lot of time to read. Please know, I do not have a lot of time to read so the book must really hold my interest. The ones above are the ones that:

1. I read the table of contents and found it interesting.

2. I read the first chapter and want to read more.

3. The author's writing was enjoyable enough that even my sleep deprived brain wanted to stay awake and read more.

 

I can already tell you that the Make The Bread, Buy The Butter book is one that I will probably buy. I am only in the first chapter or so but already there are enough recipes that it would be worth buying.

 

Wish me time and luck finding time to read all these amazing looking book.

 

What are you reading this winter?

This article was shared on SemiHomemade Mom.

 



Confessions of a Huntress

Here is my confession: I am a hunter. I am not sure why that feels like a confession, considering there are more hunters in this country than people serving in the military. (Bloomberg recently listed the number of hunters for 2011 at 13.7 mil and the numbers for the military are just under 3 mil.) Still if someone were to ask me (and they do), they seem genuinely shocked that I hunt, let alone eat wild game. Seriously people? While I was raised on venison, with the self sufficiency movement in full swing, I would think that this would be more of a norm. Alas, I often in the minority.

The last few years I was either nursing a newborn or pregnant so I unable to hunt. This year was a completely different matter and I tagged a beautiful four pointer.

The issue that recently presented itself is: how do I cook it? Growing up, my father was the cook and we ate venison most days of the week. As an adult though, I cannot really remember too many different ways we ate it. We had chops pan fried, stew, BBQ venison. The rest was either unmemorable or that was it.

As I have prepared to cook venison for my family I have been scouring the blogs and cookbooks for ways to make this delicious meat. My husband is not really a fan so I want to make sure I don't bring out the gamey flavor. (As a side note, we have found the same flavor in beef and he wasn't a fan so it isn't "in his head" as others have suggested. I notice it too but don't mind it.) I have been rather disappointed in the lack of recipes out there. The staples are there but aren't there more recipes? Surely people eat it more than just in stew or slathered in BBQ sauce. Most of the recipes I find though are variation of the above, and there isn't much variation.

As this year moves forward, I am excited to try new recipes and discover new ways to cook it. Thus far, I have pan fried it in a cast iron pan with onions, garlic powder, S+P. The pan frying was excellent. Speaking of frying, in recent years my dad has been making country fried venison which I am super excited to try in the future because I absolutely adore it. If I hear my dad is making it, you can bet I am trying to weasel an invitation or I might just pop round so the kids can see them... at dinner time, wink wink.

My father saved me some of the bones so that I can make stock this week. I found this recipe from Great Venison Cooking that I am going to try as well as some interesting tips for making stock from Field and Stream. I am also looking forward to trying Great Venison Cooking's Venison Shawarma.

I have also been pouring through my cookbooks and found very little. I was surprised however when I consulted my Polish cookbook and found some interesting recipes and marinades within its pages. One suggested to just use wine as a marinade and another had a wine and vinegar recipe:

1/3 c. water
1/3 c. vinegar
1/3 c. red wine
Bring to a boil then remove from heat. Once marinade is room temperature, add to meat. Allow meat to marinade, turning several times a day.

I used unfiltered apple cider vinegar (from Trader Joe's) because I wasn't sure what kind to use and I thought that apple would provide some good flavor and I used a Sav Cab wine left over from Christmas Eve (probably not very good to drink at this point). I put the marinade in with one package of venison steaks (frozen) and will let them thaw and marinade over the next few days. I also put a package of frozen steaks in 1 c. of red wine. I am not sure what I will make with it but I will figure it out based on what is fresh the day I cook them. The book also has everything fried in lard after marinating. I have never cooked with lard but I have been reading some interesting things about it. I even saw a review recently of this cookbook Lard: The Lost Art of Cooking with Your Grandmother's Secret Ingredient and I must admit, I am tempted to see what the deal is, although, not today. I will wait until the library gets it. Note: If someone has an extra copy they don't mind parting with, please let me know.

I also made Venison Stew in the Crock pot using a old Betty Crocker cookbook, using a few modifications. Here is the recipe I cooked (ingredients marked with a * were altered):

1 lbs cubed venison
1 onion
*omitted ingredient 1 lb small potatoes
1 apple sliced
1 bay leaf
10 1/2 oz beef broth
1 c. wine or beef broth (I used beef broth)
1/2 c. Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup maple syrup and a TBSP of black strap molasses * called for 1/2 c. brown sugar
1/8 tsp pepper
2 cloves garlic

Layer in venison, onion, potatoes, apples and bay leaf in crock pot. Pour liquids over top. Cook 8 to 10 hours on low.

Then mix 1/4 c flour and 1/4 c. water. Add to crock pot and stir. Cook 30 minutes more. Remove bay leaf and serve.

I did this last step but then I thickened the broth further with cream of wheat (I know it sounds weird but it doesn't taste like cereal or mealy. It just thickens the broth and adds lots of iron - something we are trying to get L1 lots of because he is on the low side).

I served bread with it.

Verdict: It was pretty good. There was too much Worcestershire flavor for us. The sauce also adds a lot of salt, which I noticed. It wasn't off putting but I would definitely use less the next time. Overall though the kids liked it, it was sweet and savory. It wasn't a traditional stew like I am used to but it is a good back up for when we need something different.

Do you eat venison? If so, how do you cook it?



This post was shared on Wildcrafting Wednesday.
This post was shared on The Winter On The Home Acre Hop.