Coyote Ridge FarmsWelcome To Our Rural Blog

The girls have been very creative in the kitchen today.

First prepared was the ground beef for jerky later. Daughter Madison mixed a 1½ lb. batch for pepperoni jerky. It’ll set in the fridge for a few hours, so the cure, seasonings and beef become well blended. Then tonight, we’ll put it in the food dehydrator. We have one of those little Jerky-Works guns, which makes things easier. It looks like a small chalking-gun. You simply fill it with seasoned meat and pull the trigger to make uniform ribbons on the dehydrator trays. By morning, we’ll have perfectly dried beef jerky. The ground beef we use is from Farmer Mike, of Fresh-Ayr Organic Farms. It is some of the best ground beef we’ve ever eaten… both Carol and I highly recommend Mike’s Ayrshire beef. Fresh-Ayr Farms is located near Kerkhoven, MN.

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.