Coyote Ridge FarmsWelcome To Our Rural Blog

I made several different pickles, using several recipes this summer. They are all tasty and crisp. It’s taken me a few years but I think I finally know how to make a crisp tasty pickle. Just wish I would have made more!

I am more then happy to share but I’m not so sure it’s the actual recipe or what I did that made the difference. I did some research on how to make a crisp dill pickle.

Here’s what I did different, I added grape leaves to each jar before filling with cucumbers and the rest of the stuff. I also removed the blossom ends of the cukes. When I canned them, I let the hot water canner come up to a boil, put in my jars and once they hit the water, started timing instead of waiting for the water to boil again. I removed them after 10 minutes in the canner. Once I find my recipes, I’ll share them.

As some of you may have heard, yesterday was National Pancake Day.  The thing is, when the Minnesota Vikings play football we have pizza… and yesterday the Vikes played [and won].  We decided to have pancakes tonight… in honor of yesterday’s declaration.

If you have questions, contact Carol on Facebook.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup flour
1 tbs granulated sugar
¼ cup brown sugar
½ tsp salt
½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp pumpkin pie spice
½ tsp cinnamon
½ cup pumpkin puree (I used my own frozen pumpkin from my garden)
½ tsp vanilla
1 farm fresh egg
1 cup buttermilk
2 tbs butter. melted

INSTRUCTIONS:

Combine first 7 ingredients in a bowl. In another small bowl, combine the rest of the ingredients. Now, mix them together. The batter should be pourable thin. I fried mine on a greased griddle set at 375 F degrees.

Some of you know that Carol grew up as a ‘Townie‘.  With that said, more folks know her as a farm gal.  But being on the farm for only 2 years, there are many experiences left to explore.

The last 2 days, Carol has found herself outside the ring of a couple local-ish livestock auctions, looking for goats & chickens.  It seems we are selling more livestock and poultry directly to our customers than we think we can replace sustainably.  It’s a good position to be in [business-wise] but we want all of our customers (present and future) to be able to buy the meat they want and still have a good selection in which to do so.  So, Carol has been looking primarily for more meat goats as well as a dairy goat or two… the last few weekends, we have been selling-out of raw goat milk too.

Carol knew what to do.  She started canning jam.  She had a few flats of strawberries and some stalks of rhubarb that needed to be preserved so she made 9½ pints of strawberry-blackberry jam, and the same amount of strawberry-rhubarb jam.  She then made some cheddar cheese from our raw goat milk.

I, on the other hand, went outside in between rain showers to do a little of this, then a little of that.  One of the tasks was to pound a single post in the vineyard.  Carol and I decided it was time to reinvest some of our time back into the grapes.  We want to string high-tensile wire between the posts for the vines to cling to.  We’re hoping to have better luck with the grapes this year.  Last year we were hit by hail.  The storm took the vines down to the ground.

I think it was our first hot day of the summer.

Knowing it was going to be a tad-bit warm today, I headed to the pasture early, to do some more fencing… I really wanted to get this first long run, north of the creek, done.  I realize it was a Sunday – the day of rest, but I like fencing and haying on Sundays.  It’s so relaxing… usually.  Today was a little like work, but I enjoyed it none-the-less.