New House, New Year

In an effort to stick to our normal routine, we have waited approximately two years before posting anything new. You are welcome for sparing you from seeing all the interesting and exciting things we have done with our lives. I'll do a recap post and wrap up those two years for you before getting too far into these new posts, but for now, let's focus on the New Year, 2020!

We have recently moved out of the trailer (gasp! I know, I know) and into a house. Steve's new commute is a few minute walk, which has been nice for all of us! Since moving in and re-acquainting ourselves with all our fantastic kitchen gadgets, I've found a renewed interest in bread making, and Steve has enjoyed getting back into beer brewing. We've also made it a point to try out some new-to-us recipes and spend more time creating all together in the kitchen. 

On a whim the day before Christmas I decided to mix up a sourdough starter. There are so many different websites that tell you so many different ways to get it started, so naturally, I just picked the easiest one and ran with it. 1 cup of unbleached flour and 1/2 cup of water. Each day I poured out half and replenished it with the same 1 cup flour and 1/2 cup of water. It bubbled up by day two and I was pretty pumped about that. 

Around this same time, Steve needed to rack his beer and take the trub off the bottom, and I'll let him elaborate on that process because beer making just isn't my jam. I'll stick with drinking it, thanks! Anyways, when he drained that grainy goodness into a pitcher, we both had the same thoughts....why not use that as a bread starter? Of course, it's cheating a little bit. The trub has some spent yeast, but also some active bubbly yeast, and as soon as we added some flour to that bad boy it bubbled forth vigorously. That very night we cooked a loaf of beer bread and it was pretty tasty. A little bit of bitterness from the hops, but all in all it was good. The crumb was nice, it sliced like a dream, and best of all it was made from the the leftover stuff that you would normally just toss out! (We've actually been making a strong effort to use up the stuff that normally gets tossed out: beef bones and chicken bones get turned to stock, trub gets turned into bread, leftover pork gets turned into enchilada soup, chicken tenders cut from the whole chicken breasts are made into delicious fried chicken strips and so on and so on.) 

Since that loaf I've been feeding and caring for two sourdough starters. Both are pretty mild tasting now, and you can smell that they are different, but the beer starter isn't very beer-like any longer. I'm hoping that in time they will start to develop some more flavor.

This latest attempt was from my original sourdough starter. I found the recipe in the book: Artisan Sourdough Made Simple by Emilee Raffa. It's a beautiful book! I can't wait to make my way through the recipes. 

This first loaf turned out simply beautiful, as you can see by Steve's fancy photos. It crackled and popped and it was so exciting to watch and hear. While it looks beautiful and had all the signs of (amateur) perfection I was hoping for, it turns out I completely forgot to add the salt that the recipe called for. So, while it looks and feels beautiful, it's pretty bland. The sourdough flavor isn't very strong either. Again, I'm hoping that will improve over time. Maybe it would have brought the taste out more if I hadn't neglected one of the very few ingredients in the recipe?? I don't know, but I do know that I will try again and see!

Here are a few photos from the most recent makes: 

She looks so pretty in my lovely new dutch oven!

I love that you can still see the rings from the banneton that it rested in for the final rise. I was worried they wouldn't actually show up after it was baked, but they totally did!

The tortilla soup that I mentioned before was made from leftover pork shoulder that we cooked for tamales, and the stock that we had been brewing from leftover bones. 

Not pictured is the enormous plate of Alton Brown's chicken parm from the reloaded Good Eats season that Steve made the night before that yielded all theses scrumptious little chicken fingers that were left on the bone after cutting all the breasts for the chicken parm. The baked potato fries were also an Alton Brown recipe that we caught a glimpse of on his Good Eats Reloaded show. 

The bubbly beer starter

First beer trub loaf doing it's thang for the final rise.

Steve and Steven were left home alone one day and decided to clear out our rotten banana population. They found a new recipe online and gave it a try. They were so moist and yummy we printed the recipe right away and added it to our recipe collection. In case you want to try it was Sarah's Banana Bread Muffins on Allrecipes.com with some adjustments (extra banana, 50/50 wheat/white flour, 77/33 brown/white sugar, generous splash of vanilla, and unknown quantity/overly generous 'dashes' of cinnamon). 

Stay tuned for more obnoxious pictures of our food and happenings around here at the 

(not-technically-a) Trailerhood. 

Latest Happenings at the Ranch

It has been a while...And so much has happened since I last wrote I'm actually not sure where to start.

We got back from Jacksonville mid March and have been going non-stop since.

I'll spare you the long post and just give you the highlights.

We've ridden roller coasters, driven SO many miles, had dinner with cousins, worked in the garden, had visitors, hunted Easter eggs, saw some local sights, ate a table full of crawfish with friends and family, unschooled with the unschooliest at the tex-uns conference, rescued a pup for Grandma and Pop, Adelyn started a new business, attended a recital for 2 of our favorite violinists, and have had some up close and personal wildlife sightings on our very own piece of Texas! 

Changes at the Ranch

My family insists on calling this place the Riviera Ranch, so I guess I will too. So, henceforth it shall be referred to as such!

Speaking of the Ranch, we have enjoyed some upgrades this past weekend. We now have electricity! And, do you know what that means?? Warm showers! Out there, where there is more dirt, dust, mud, and sand than anything else, a warm shower makes a world of difference at the end of an exhausting day. Next time we're out there maybe I'll take a picture of the shower set up so you can have a good laugh, but for now, you'll just have to take my word for it...it's something else! I'm sure it was meant to be a temporary solution for the previous owners, but they abandoned ship and left it as is. Since we haven't had time to work on that yet, we also are using it in it's temporary-middle-of-the-house-open-to-everything state. Like I said, it's warm, it's clean, and that's all that matters for now.

Steve also set up an outlet for the camper! We can now use the lights and fan (although the current fan bit the dust) and the A/C or heater if we need it. The kids enjoyed a movie before bed even! Crazy how fancy a little electricity can make you feel ;)

We didn't get as much accomplished as we had hoped this weekend. The plan was to organize the inside of the house, which is full of building supplies and such, that didn't happen. We planned to put in some posts for garden fences, a swing set, and the chicken coop upgrade, but we only got one post set, and it was too dark to take a picture of it. We planned to move the camper and put it closer to the house and the power source, and that did happen! We moved it and not only did we get it hooked up, we made a little patio and Steve even hooked up the satellite.

It's hard to tell from the picture but another thing we were able to finish was clearing out the weeds around the house. Even after this picture was taken we pulled more out and took out that tree of thorns up against the white shed. 

For my birthday I picked out a bunch of plants from a local nursery. They didn't have much, but I like what we picked out. They are supposed to get citrus trees in late this week, so hopefully we can snag some of those too. 

Philodendron, Robellini Palm, Washington
 Palm, can't remember, and a Camellia 

Norfolk Pine

We planted most of them, but I'm still unsure where to put the camellia. I don't know what specific kind it is and some varieties grow to 2-4 feet, and some varieties grow as big as 16 feet...that's a pretty significant difference! Not to mention it needs partial shade, and that can be hard to find around here. I'm thinking I'll put it on one of the corners of the house, but I'm going to think about it a bit more before putting it in.

The garden is moving along. Waiting for seeds to sprout is worse than waiting for Christmas to get here...it feels like they will never get big enough to plant. The only thing really taking off is the pumpkin seeds. Others are slowly coming up, but not the ones I'm most excited for, the tomatoes. 

On January 14 or 15 I planted a lettuce mix, beets, carrots, and swiss chard. I seeded those directly into the ground, and they are doing well. I'm hoping to see bigger growth in that bed next week. We'll see though. The ground has been really hard. Our sand is really fine, and beneath the few inches of sand is a really hard slippery clay. I think with the next bed I will try to mix in compost and peet moss and see how that works. 

 January 20th and 21st my mom, the kids and I all planted some seeds in seed starter trays. We planted pumpkins, purple tomatillas, red cabbage, golden cabbage, luffas, orange-green-purple-yellow bell peppers, green tomatillas, mortgage lifter tomatoes, amish paste tomatoes, thessolaniki tomatoes, black krim tomatoes, gardeners delight tomatoes, german chamomile, calendula, bee balm, and lavendar. I ordered all the seeds from Annie's Heirloom Seeds. There's also one more, but I can't read what I wrote...note for next time, use sharpie. 

I still have some purple potatoes, onions, and a lot of herbs to plant. Once the garden is fenced, I am also planning on buying some okra, squash, and cucumber plants. 

Still so much work to do to get the garden where I want it to be, but seeds are growing and that's exciting! I can't wait to harvest some food. It's been too long since I got to have my very own garden. 

We have lots of projects planned, and they all take time, and money. Can't wait to have a garden fence, a chicken coop, and a swing for the kids, but we also have a building that needs an all new metal skin around it, and that will be quite the task! Who knows what will come next, but I'll keep you posted. 

I'll leave you with our last upgrade to the ranch this past week, and that is...........

Just one lonely egg, but hey, it's an egg! One of our americaunas (makes green eggs)is laying one a day...except yesterday, she didn't want to take time out of her busy day of exploring the world outside of the coop to lay an egg. Hopefully the other two follow suit soon. 

Until next time friends!!

-Katie

South Texas!

So, it's been a while...shocking! We are usually so good at updating things around here. Anyways, since we posted last we have moved to south Texas. We are still living in the Montana fifth wheel on base, but we also bought some property (eeeek!) At first glance it's not what most people would call paradise, or would even want to call home! But, we love it and I think it's a good fit for us.

The first time we drove to this property, Steve and I were both charmed with the dusty, bumpy dirt road. There was only one home nearby, and two pieces of property next to each other listed for sale. The gate had to be lifted off the hinges for us to go in (the lock hadn't been removed in so long and no one had a key), and we were wary of taking the truck in the 'driveway', afraid that we might puncture a tire on the weird, sharp, stick-like bushes that grow everywhere down here, but we did. It was a mess. Everything was so overgrown it was hard to tell if this was a good deal or not. I decided it was not, but Steve was in love. Even the realtor knew it after he was describing it to her!! She said she saw that look in his eye....and she was right.  I wish I had taken more pictures of the landscape at that moment, before we took ownership. It's so hard to describe and now you'll never know what I saw when we walked up the first time. Lucky for you, I do have pictures of the disgusting buildings that came with this property. I wish I could share the smells with you...maybe I'll take that up with the yankee candle people. It was awful. A huge building full of stuff that had been strewn about and was collecting rat feces and mold as water was pouring through the large holes in the roof. Gross!

Here's a decent shot of the brush that was everywhere!

Fast forward to today and we have 3 cleaned out, well, empty buildings, a driveway you can drive on, a backyard, a small chicken coop, a tiny bit of the garden area tilled and planted, and a path all the way to the back, which doesn't sound like a lot, but my goodness it took an entire day on a big tractor to make that happen. We have spent almost every weekend working out there, and even though most of the time we come back completely exhausted, it's been so fulfilling to polish this diamond in the rough a little at a time. So come visit, family and friends, we have water, a working toilet, and plenty of space to pitch a tent :) Soon we'll even have electricity, and we'll be really fancy!

I'm hoping to keep up with the posts for a while. I want to keep track of the progress we've made. There's no telling how long we will get to live here and I'm trying to make the most of this short opportunity to live out my homesteading dreams.

I'll leave you with the lovely pictures of our paradise and our beloved chickens that have yet to lay any eggs since they arrived. And, there are no hard feelings about that (yet) since they have endured quite a bit of stress over the last couple of weeks. Travelling 400 miles, a hard freeze, raccoon break-in attempts....they are a tough bunch! Can't wait to upgrade their coop in the future and bring in some more feathered friends. Without further ado...meet Fabio (rooster), Goldilocks (gold colored americana), Featherina (orange americana), and Black Shadow (black and white barred rock).