Kayla's Conversations

Last weekend, my family and I went to Lake Cumberland Bluegrass Festival. The highlight of the event was the evening show by J.D. Crowe. He had played earlier in the day, and I was somewhat dissapointed because he didn’t have a fiddle player with him. But, when he got up to play his evening show, there was a fiddler with the band, and turns out, it was Ronnie Stewart! So I was pretty excited! I also just wanted to share a few pictures of my ever-enthusiastic family, trying to put on the show of having a grand time at a bluegrass festival.

And Mom and Philip were trying to amuse themselves by…walking!

We had these wraps for lunch, and I’ll blog on those another time…

~Kayla

Back to Custer Family Farm!

Written 8-28

Well, I don’t know how the ‘pros’ de-glaze their mushrooms, but this is how I do it. And who knows…maybe I am a pro…

I was cooking these mushrooms and onions to go with the steak that we were having for supper one evening. I start off by sautéing the mushrooms and onions (or just plain mushrooms) in a fair amount of butter or lard, and plenty of salt. In my opinion, most of the time when I eat mushrooms out somewhere, they are pretty bland. This deglazing, along with butter and salt, makes them outstanding! When they’re cooking, they emit a good bit of liquid, as you can see here!

You want to simmer all of that liquid out…

And then keep cooking it until it almost sticks to the pan. It’ll be brown, but don’t worry!

When your whole pan looks like this, then you need to add just a little bit of some sort of liquid. I’ve recently discovered this “Fine White Wine Vinegar,” and I love the flavor it gives the mushrooms! You can also use water, and I know some people use wine, but I don’t usually have any of that sitting around in my kitchen. Usually… Any water, vinegar, wine, or anything like that will work fine.

You’ll want to sprinkle in just enough of the liquid to loosen all of the brown stuff from the bottom of the skillet, and stir it in quickly.

If all of the glaze didn’t come off with the amount of liquid you added, you can add a little more. The point here is, you don’t want standing liquid in your mushrooms…just enough liquid to get the stuff of the pan.

This process not only adds a ton of flavor to the sautéed mushrooms, it also gives them a lovely golden color! We enjoyed these with our grass-fed, organic steak!

Enjoy!

~Kayla

Written 8-23

We’ve had a birth on the farm! And no, I don’t have another brother, or a new sister. Doggone. Our cattle herd has increased in size! Just slightly, though, because he’s a small fella! Bella, my Dutch Belted/Holstein cross was AI bred last year to an Angus, and calved August 16. Everyone did great, and I actually happened to be there for the birth! For all the time we’ve had cows, the happy event always eluded spectators…we always just had one more cow than the day before! We had to leave to go out of town the very next day (the 17th) so I wasn’t able to be here to supervise nursing and baby/mother relations. Bella is a great mama, licking all over the baby (which is a solid black boy, by the way) but the poor thing doesn’t know to make the calf nurse. I can only speculate that, being a previous dairy cow, she just didn’t know what to do with a baby. But calves are smart and persistent little things, and my milk cow that I am (or was) milking now (Minnie) is a brilliant mama. To everyone and everything. Sooo…the two of them soon formed a very special attachment, one that has left us milkless for the time being. Yikes! In an effort to right everything, I’ve brought Bella and baby up to the house and fenced them in, and left the other cows out in the field, about ½ a mile from the house. (Great time for Dad and Dave to be gone to John C. Campbell Folk School for the week!)

[P.S. Added later the same day…
After taking all of the cows back down to their own pen twice, after they kept on jumping the electric fence and coming back, we finally decided (or rather, were forced into deciding) to just leave all the dadgum cows up here, and keep Minnie and the baby apart. After much trial and tribulation, I finally got the baby to nurse from Bella! Yay! I think everything’s going to work fine as long as we can keep Minnie out of the pen with the baby.]

In all of this mess, Bella has developed mastitis. I’m now working on healing her of that, while trying to get the baby to recognize his true Mama, and trying to get Bella to stand still for a calf to nurse. She is the most patient cow we’ve ever had, and as such, she does really well when I milk her. Even with the mastic udder, she stands still for me and doesn’t kick at all. I’m feeding her garlic powder in her feed (we feed straight corn right now) and I’m also whipping up a cream to apply topically. I’ve made this cream before when my cows were sick, and it has helped tremendously. The first time I made this cream, I followed a recipe, and then the next time I deviated slightly, just changing types of oils and that sort of thing. This recipe is such a deviation, it’s my own now. I’m thinking “Milkin’ Mama Cream”… I’ll just give a quick overview of what I’m using in the cream, and why, instead of posting the whole recipe. It’s not that I mind posting my recipe, quite the contrary, but I’m not sure that there is enough demand for a recipe to cure your cows of mastitis! Nonetheless, if someone would like the recipe, just leave me a comment telling me, and I’ll certainly post it for you! Oh, why not…I’ll just go ahead and post it anyway! By the way, this works just as well for human mothers, and it not only fights and prevents infection, it also helps the milk let down. However, I’m in the process of making this cream, (instead of writing the post later, I’m writing it as I make the cream) and I have a pretty good idea that it’s not going to smell so good, which may be a deterrent for some human mothers!!!

First of all, I went out and gathered a good bit of fresh plantain. I’m going to steep my lard (one of my base oils) with the plantain, and a couple other things. I’m not sure how much I got…this big pile pictured below! Also, I’m using 3 small onions (about the equivalent to 1 regular size onion) and 4 large cloves of garlic. Garlic is antifungal, antiviral, and pretty much anti-anything bad! Onion helps inflammation, and if you make a poultice of onions when you have a cold, it will break up the congestion. I’m not able to do further research on the topical benefits of the onion right now, but I know that it is good for you, in many ways similar to garlic, so I put it in. I’ve raved about plantain before, so you probably know what a big fan of it I am! To recap, plantain is anti-infection, which is what I’m dealing with here…the mastitis. The plantain draws out infection, and that’s what I need.

I want 12 ounces of infused lard when I get done, so I steeped these herbs in plenty of lard…probably nearly 3 cups. I can always do something with any that I have leftover! So I chopped everything to smithereens so it would break down and infuse better, and then mixed all of that in with the lard. I warmed it and then just let it steep very, very low for a while. Just for the record, when I said I was going to add onion, Mom said I should add some fish and tartar sauce and we’d have supper. Now my own mother is making fun of me. Well, that’s nothing new, but still!!! [Added after the cream was done…I probably had 1 1/4 cups of infused lard left over, so you would be safe with infusing 2 cups at the most. I was playing it safe, not knowing how much lard would be lost clinging to the herbs when I strained it!]

After it has steeped for a while (maybe an hour or so)I let it cool until it’s just warm and then I drain it out, and measure out my 12 ounces. (Oh, and by the way, remember how I said it wasn’t going to smell very nice? It actually smells great right now! Sort of like a soup…) I drain things like this through cloths that can be thrown away, as that is so much easier than trying to get oils out of old rags! I squeezed the pack of herbs to make sure I got all the juices from everything out.

Then I mix the required amount of lard (12 ounces) with 6 ounces of coconut oil (which has antiviral, antifungal, and antibacterial qualities in addition to promoting cell repair and being just plain GREAT for skin in every way imaginable!) and 1 ounce of beeswax.

And warm until the beeswax melts and it’s all mixing together nicely…

Let that cool just a tad…15 minutes or so –

Then add in 10 drops of grapefruit seed extract, 4 teaspoons fennel essential oil, and 18 ounces water.

Mix with a hand-blender for a couple of minutes, just until the mixture is all white and creamy looking. Hm…I really thought it would be green, since I infused the lard with plantain, but it’s not green at all! It’s pretty!

After I mixed mine, I let it set for a few minutes and then blended a little again, just to make sure that the water and oils emulsified completely…

Then I poured it into a few containers to cool all of the way. I didn’t have any more jars to put it in, so I had to make do with various plastic containers that we had handy!

Not only is this cream wonderful for ailments due to nursing, (human or otherwise!) it is a fantastic lotion! It’s heavy-duty stuff, so it would be best to put it on your hands and/or feet before bed and cover up with gloves or socks. I just use this cream when I milk, and I notice an improvement in my skin just from using it for that short amount of time. I don’t like the smell of fennel (it smells like black licorice) so it’s not something I slather on every hour or so! The fennel smell in this is so strong, I can’t even smell ANY of the other ingredients…like the garlic or onion.

As a side note, if you don’t have an immersion blender, I recommend using some sort of strong mixer, maybe a regular blender. I’ve made this recipe before, just using man-power (or I guess it was woman-power!) to stir it with a spoon or fork, and it did NOT work right. The water kept separating back out from the oils, which left me with quite a mess!
If you don’t want to use lard, you can use any liquid oil, but then you have to alter the amount of beeswax you use. Since lard is semi-solid at room temperature, it will behave differently than if you used olive oil, or something like that. If you want to use olive oil (or safflower, or any liquid oil) the amounts would be 12 oz oil, 6 oz coconut oil, and 2 oz beeswax. Also, the measurements I gave here makes a LOT of cream. I need that much, since I’ll soon be using it on 3 cows, but you may not need quite so much! The quantities listed here are essentially a double batch. So the normal recipe would be half of everything listed…6 oz lard (or liquid oil,) 3 oz coconut oil, ½ oz beeswax (unless you alter it for a liquid oil, in which case you would use 1 oz,) 9 oz water, 2 teaspoons fennel essential oil, and 5 drops grapefruit seed extract. I hope I haven’t confused anyone with all of that!

I’m sure you’ll love this cream just as much as I do, if you make some yourself! And if you don’t want to make it yourself, well, I may be offering some of my latest medicinal concoctions on the website for sale soon, in which case you’d probably be able to buy a bit of this stuff from me. We’ll see…

Enjoy Milkin’ Mama Cream! And let me know what you think, too!

~Kayla

Written 9-24

Some of you may remember that our van died a while back. It’s been nearly 2 years, I think, since it died. We’ve looked into getting it hauled off to the junkyard, but just haven’t done it yet. Now we’re ready to get it out of the yard (don’t you love when folks have old, dead, vehicles overgrown with weeds, sitting in the yard?!) but I’ve been dying to have the stereo out of it. When we lived in GA, a co-worker of Dad’s put nice stereo systems in both our van and truck. The one in my car is a continual aggravation to me, so I wanted to swap it out. Trouble is, Dad had already tried getting it out, and he couldn’t figure out how. Today we were in a getting-it-done sort of mood, so I decided to swap out the stereos. Need I remind you that we’re very much a do-it-yourself sort of family? To convince you of that, in case you didn’t already know, several years ago the air conditioner in an old Cougar of our’s went bad. Dad found out what was wrong with it, but didn’t have the money to get someone to fix it. My granddad came home one day to find the dashboard out of the car, and the entire contents of the dashboard laid out on a tarp in the yard. (We lived next door to him.) Dad had taken the whole thing apart, determined to fix it himself. My granddad made the statement “that car will never leave the driveway again!” Well, Dad not only put everything back together, but the air worked, and the car left the driveway many, many times over again! He did have an extra screw at the end, but I guess it wasn’t an important screw! All that to emphasize the do-it-yourself attitude ‘round these parts! Why pay someone to do something you could do, or most likely do, yourself? It’s a good, albeit slightly scary and sometimes reckless, attitude to have!

So, I got out an old phonebook, called up the place that installed the stereo for us, and asked for Dad’s former co-worker. He wasn’t there, but another guy helped me over the phone. When I explained my situation, he told me that I’d have to have some sort of metal key to release the stereo from its metal casing. To find that, I’d have to find a stereo shop and ask them for these special keys. Humph. Well, I was ready to switch them NOW! So, after a lot of finagling (a word I should work into my bio, I think…) with safety pins, paper clips, and finally, kitchen knives, I got the stereo out! I did have to sort of tear the plastic off the inside of the van (good thing we’re junking it!), but I got the stereo out! After that, I was on the phone with the guy from the stereo shop again, and he told me how to undo the various wires (there were about a dozen, I think) and when I asked him about a black hose-looking thing plugged into the back of the stereo, he said “is it the antenna?” Um…that’s why I asked you! I have NO idea what any of this is! So, I didn’t have to cut any wires in the van, because when the guys at the stereo shop installed this one, they had done a very neat, orderly job. All I had to do was get the wire nuts off, and untwist the wires from each other. Got it!

Ok! Now I had the stereo out of the van, a handful of wire nuts, needle nose pliers, and wire cutters. But then I took my stereo out of my car. As I pulled it out, the wires just kept coming…and coming! There were, oh, maybe, 12,000,000 or so, all tangled up in my dash! It was actually a great thing, because the stereo that was in the car when I bought it wasn’t the original one, so someone else had replaced it. In doing that, that had added some sort of plug that plugged into the existing wire and color-coded the extensions to match other stereos! After I sat there and studied and analyzed for a bit, I saw that all of my wires really did match. All but one odd blue one, that is. In the stereo from the van, there was a blue wire that wasn’t connected to anything…it was just capped off. But in my car, there was a blue wire coming from the gaping hole where my stereo used to be. (Along with the other 11,999,999 wires.) Oh, well. As I studied, I found a slight problem. The wires from my car were printed with what they were…front left, front right, etc. That was great, but then I saw that the wires were labeled positive and negative as well. No problem there…positives go with positives, negatives with negatives. Well, the wires on the back of the new stereo weren’t labeled so conveniently. But then, it dawned on me! In each set of wires, one would be solid, and the other would be solid, but have a black stripe running the length of the wire! So after I got all that figured out, I snipped all the wires in my car (Yikes!) and then stripped the ends. I was a little nervous at this point, because I didn’t know if the wires would be hot or not! I mean, the car wasn’t on, so they shouldn’t be, but I was still nervous! I wasn’t in the mood to blow up or fry. So, I matched two wires up…purple positives…and flicked them together for a split second. I don’t know what happened, but at that exact moment, the lock/unlock button in my car did its little clickity thing a couple of times, and I almost jumped into next week! It didn’t happen again, though, so I guess it was just a fluke. I hope. Anyway, I matched all the wires up, twisted them all together tightly, and then clamped the wire nuts on the ends. All except for the blue wires…I was still unsure about what to do with those! After I got everything together, I turned the key in my car, and hit the stereo’s power button. Well, all the lights came on, and all of the buttons worked, but there was no sound whatsoever. Hm. So then I stripped the ends of the blue wires, twisted them together, and then clamped on the wire nut. And repeated the turning the key and all that…and the lights came on, and I blasted the whole yard with bluegrass!!!! It worked!!! I did it!!!

I did have to work with it some more, to get the new stereo in the old hole, and I ended up having to swap out the metal casing. My new stereo wouldn’t fit in the old metal casing, and then the old metal casing wouldn’t slide over the new stereo, and since I had already attached all the wires, I had to cut the old casing to get it off. I was able to slide the new casing in, bend the tabs back up to hold it in, and then snap the new stereo in place.

Here are the pictures to prove it!

My old stereo…see? It’s just so ugly!

Taking the stereo out of the van. The wires are so tidy here…

See..all the ends are wire nutted neatly!

Taking the stereo out of my car. This is where I got a little intimidated at the wires!

And the wires just kept coming!!!

Look at all of them! Yikes!

“I hope this is the right one to cut!”

Snip, snip, snip…

Snip, snip, snip, snip…

My camera man (Titus) left, so I didn’t get pictures of twisting all of the wires together and clamping the wire nuts back on. This is the next picture I got…see the numbers?!

This is where I turned it on and everything but the sound (that little, unimportant thing!) worked fine. So I twisted the blues together and then tried it again. The sounds worked this time, so I installed it in the gaping stereo hole…

Now, doesn’t that look snazzy?!

Ok, so who’s impressed? Besides me, that is! Later I told Mom that I was going to go fix my fuel gauge next! Now that is something that is an aggravation! And maybe I could figure out why my horn only works every now and then, and maybe fix my air conditioner (it’ll blow out the dash up by the windshield, OR blow out the vents, depending on how you press the gas pedal…)

Dave said “forget leatherworking…be a mechanic!” Mom told me to go fix the engine in the van. Dad just said “HOW?” when I told him on the phone. He couldn’t figure out how to get the thing out for anything! Oh, and by the way, if you’re ever in a similar situation and don’t have the essential metal key, butter knives work best!

~Kayla

Written 8-28

I am always surprised that more people don’t make their own popcorn! Around here, we LOVE popcorn, often having it for a meal. The guys in our church play basketball after church on Sunday nights, which means there is no time to eat anything between church and basketball. Certain members of our family are VERY hard to live with if they go any amount of time without food (no names,) so that posed a real problem for the guys in our family who wanted to go play basketball. Everyone wanted to go, but we were frankly afraid of starving slap to death in that amount of time (noon to 10pm.) I finally (brilliant as I am!) came up with a great idea…we would take bags of popped popcorn and eat it on the way from church to play basketball! It was great, and we weren’t hungry by the time we got there!

I don’t remember our family ever buying microwave popcorn. Mom can’t remember the last time she bought it, either. Dad always made our popcorn in a pan on top of the stove…Dad says he thinks he learned from his older brother, who he thinks must have learned from his mom. That’s a lot of speculation, isn’t it?! I had some micro-corn at someone’s house a while back (names not mentioned for their privacy…LOL!) and it just was NOT good! Even if we were to want to buy microwave popcorn (no idea why…) we would have a tough go of it, because we don’t have a microwave. We haven’t had one for at least 5 years now, but that’s another post entirely!

I was next in the generational line, so I was taught how to make the popcorn. (It’s never good to learn how to do something around here…you are then stuck with the job from then on out! But then I taught Dave…) Now Dave and I are the popcorn-makers. I don’t even remember the last time Dad made it now! Mom’s never even tried. Reckon she knows better!

Without even taking into consideration the ingredient list on a package of microwave popcorn (just because I don’t have the resources right now) you should choose to make homemade popcorn for taste alone! I guarantee that if you try making popcorn this way, you’ll never want to eat the fake stuff again. So how about it…ready to make your own popcorn?! All you need is butter, popcorn, and salt! A dear friend doesn’t even need salt, but that’s certainly not me!

I start out with a generous amount of butter (or lard, or coconut oil, depending on how much of what we have available!) Don’t use vegetable oils…they aren’t good for you, but hey, that’s yet another post entirely! I would define my “generous amount” as a couple of tablespoons. I always make popcorn in a medium-size saucepan with a tight-fitting lid. (Unless I’m making it over an open fire in Pennsylvania at a Civil War reenactment, in which case I use a huge cast iron dutch oven that is very heavy and hard to shake.) The pressure and heat have to be able to build up inside the pan to pop the popcorn.

When the oil of your choice is very hot, sprinkle in enough popcorn to cover the bottom of your pan. You can start with just covering the bottom of your pan, until you get the feel for the ratio of popcorn to pan! I put more in than just covering the bottom, but I know how much I am comfortable dealing with. It’s easiest to just cover the bottom…

You can give it a few minutes to heat up (you’re doing this over medium-high heat, which I’ve forgotten to specify until now) and then as it starts popping (you’ll hear it!) you need to shake the pan around a bit. Your goal is to keep it from sticking and burning, and so you want to shake the loose corn kernels to the bottom of the pan as they pop. Here I am doing some serious multi-tasking…I’m making Banana Pudding, Mozzarella Cheese, and shaking Popcorn! I promise…the Banana Pudding blog is still in the wings…

When it’s done popping, you won’t hear it popping anymore. Isn’t that simple? You do need to wait and listen for a minute, to make sure all the kernels are done popping. Shake the pan around over the heat to make sure there aren’t any stray kernels stuck up in the popped corn. When you don’t hear any more popping, pour the popcorn into a large bowl, and salt to taste. (Very generously, if we’re eating it!)

When we eat this on Sunday night before basketball, the whole family gets a satisfying snack for less than $1.00. Beat THAT! It’s great for any time you leave the house and want to save a little money as far as food goes! Besides, it’s healthier than most of the stuff you can buy for a quick snack.

I swear, you will never want microwave popcorn again, and not just because you’ll save yourself the free-radicals and artificial flavoring! If you want, you can drizzle extra melted butter over the top, or make this spice to sprinkle over it…it’s a nice change! Use your imagination! I’ve been dying to make popcorn balls, but Mom won’t hear of…I have no idea why!

Popcorn Spice:
1/4 cup ground cumin
3 Tablespoons dried oregano
1 Tablespoon cayenne pepper (or less to taste)

Combine the ingredients and pour into a salt shaker (or any old spice container with a shaker lid.) Sprinkle over popcorn!