Supper from the garden, from last year's hunt and a good day stacking

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lowroadacres

Minister of Fire
Aug 18, 2009
544
MB
Given that there is no clear spot on the site to talk about food I figure "do it yourself" is as good as any place to put this out there.

As I type, I am sitting on our barbecuing area, my 13 year old is cooking bannock on a stick over a bed of coals in our firepit and I am keeping an eye on tin foil packages on the barbecue which contain....

Fresh carrots, onions and potatoes from our garden.... They are dosed heartily with butter and mixed in with venison loin cut finely.

Not sure how I am not going to over eat tonight given the nature of our feast!

This will top off the afternoon of stacking with the bannock cooking 13 year old. We also got a pile of raspberries from our garden this afternoon.

Thinking back I also got the chain on the Husky brought back from a nasty battle with "something" in a stump. One of these days I am going to have to get off my very light wallet and buy a new chain.

If I can roll myself away from the table this evening I hope to go cut and split a 1/4 cord load of ash down by the river south of our house.

And to think I was grumpy when the thunderstorm woke us up at 6:30 this morning.
 
I saw Bobby Flay make Bannock on tv and it looked awesome.

Im enjoying a lot of fresh heirloom tomatoes from the garden and fresh eggs from my 4 hens. Its a great feeling.

Do you have a good bannock recipe?
 
Bannock recipe..... a bunch of flour... Some salt..... Some more baking powder (some say this is cheating) lots of butter or margarine... Work with the ratios until you have a firm elastic dough... knead and stretch it into flat rounds or ovals.... Run the fry pan up to medium heat with butter or oil and fry the bannock. We did half of it this way this evening and the other half we did over the fire by pinching it around a peeled box elder stick.... The fire was mostly good hot coals and our son patiently worked it round and round for about 15 minutes. I think I am going to have seconds now for a night snack.

I did force myself back out to the bush this evening in spite being tired and the mosquitoes. I have this crazy goal of averaging a cord a week between now and when the snow gets too deep to head into the bush.

When I unload the trailer tomorrow morning I will have gotten more than a cord home c/s/s/..... Their is another quarter cord or better in rounds down at the woodlot.

This coming week I will need to do more than a cord because I will be away for work the next week.

You mention fresh eggs... That will be breakfast tomorrow on the leftover bannock. We keep about 25 laying hens. We have 21 new ones from incubating eggs this spring and we are growing 25 meat birds which we purchased as chicks. If we get ambitious this year we may work to get some wheat from our neighbours who farm the adjacent property and borrow my mom's flour mill to make our own whole wheat flour. It all takes time but boy is it worth it when it comes to the satisfaction of eating one's own produce.
 
lowroadacres said:
Bannock recipe..... a bunch of flour... Some salt..... Some more baking powder (some say this is cheating) lots of butter or margarine... Work with the ratios until you have a firm elastic dough... knead and stretch it into flat rounds or ovals.... Run the fry pan up to medium heat with butter or oil and fry the bannock. We did half of it this way this evening and the other half we did over the fire by pinching it around a peeled box elder stick.... The fire was mostly good hot coals and our son patiently worked it round and round for about 15 minutes. I think I am going to have seconds now for a night snack.

I did force myself back out to the bush this evening in spite being tired and the mosquitoes. I have this crazy goal of averaging a cord a week between now and when the snow gets too deep to head into the bush.

When I unload the trailer tomorrow morning I will have gotten more than a cord home c/s/s/..... Their is another quarter cord or better in rounds down at the woodlot.

This coming week I will need to do more than a cord because I will be away for work the next week.

You mention fresh eggs... That will be breakfast tomorrow on the leftover bannock. We keep about 25 laying hens. We have 21 new ones from incubating eggs this spring and we are growing 25 meat birds which we purchased as chicks. If we get ambitious this year we may work to get some wheat from our neighbours who farm the adjacent property and borrow my mom's flour mill to make our own whole wheat flour. It all takes time but boy is it worth it when it comes to the satisfaction of eating one's own produce.

A cord a week? that is some goal! haha I just went on a 6 day splitting binge last week. no idea how much i'll have on hand after everything is stacked...im guessing around 10 cords. Which is awesome because now I wont have to go into overdrive....i can scrounge and process at a normal pace.

Im going to try to make some bannock this morning with breakfast. I was also interested in starting a pancake garden (aka small wheat garden) but I couldnt find any wheat seed locally. It sucks that a lot of the farms are being sold and developed around me....we have prime farming land in this part of the country. Hopefully this eat local movement will keep a lot of the farmers in business and also inspire the younger generation to stay the course.
 
When we left farming as a family calling in the late eighties, due to financial challenges, we maintained an acreage with a few beef cows, 500 chickens, a few pigs, and a large garden. Once my brother and I left home it didn't take long and mom and dad chose to let even that go. When we found our acreage about ten years ago, even though it is only 2.5 acres, we made a conscious decision to have at last some farming lifestyle built into our lives. We are blessed to be literally on city limits but to have access to hundreds of acres for hunting and for firewood cutting all within an easy walk of our home.

We have access to wheat if we choose, beef and pork all direct from the farmer to augment our own wild game hunting and processing our own chickens. If I would get more diligent about fishing in the good sized river near our house we could probably do away with buying any form of meat from the store.

I can only imagine the challenges of living in areas where development is driving the process. What is astounding to me though, having been in and around many major urban centers of North America, is how short of a drive it really takes to find farms, acreages and areas where wildlife still exists.

Some of the ways that "should" help me manage to hit the one cord a week average will be that once the the neighbours take the crop off of the land we will be doing some "all hands on deck firewood days". We have two homes on our acreage as my wife's parents moved a manufactured home onto our yard a year and a half ago. They love to cut firewood as they used to have an OWB. Anyone who has used one of those knows that you have to love to cut wood for the volume that they require.

Add to this my wife, myself and our for children ages 9, 12, 13, and 16 ..... and add in a couple of friends who love to cut wood but who no longer have wood stoves....

If we do some prep work ahead of time so we are not "felling" with a crowd but rather cutting wood that we have felled...

Rent a splitter...

Have the tractor and trailer, 2 half tons, and a half ton trailer....

It won't take us long to put up a pile of wood ...

The big trick on a day like that is preparation ahead of time to make certain that there is somewhat of a system and that there is a place to put the wood ahead of time. If we do it right it will even be stacked by day's end.

My goal right now is to have enough for two to three years on hand plus extra for selling/donating.

Until the crop is off, likely in mid August by the way it looks right now, I will continue to find an hour and half here and there to go back and forth with our 20 hp ford new holland tractor and our dumpy little trailer either early mornings, late evenings or whenever I can grab the hours needed. Given that I am splitting it with the 6 or 8 pound maul as I go I figure that this is a waaaaay better use of my time than sitting in a gymnasium with no windows on an exercise bike watching Oprah.
 
BucksCoBernie said:
I saw Bobby Flay make Bannock on tv and it looked awesome.
Do you have a good bannock recipe?

I've made this a TON since i saw that episode. I've used his method of just mixing up with water till it feels right. If you're grilling it like he did, keep it thick so it doesn't want to fall through the grates, or else put a piece of foil underneath it to be safe. Used blueberries like in the episode, raisins, nothing, elderberries, etc. etc,. I keep a cannister with the mix always in and just add the cup of water up at the cabin.

The other thing that's awesome if you've never tried it is keeping peanuts / pistachios on top of the stove for munchies all day.
 
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