Goats, Stock, Cheese, and Thunder...

I finished getting all of the chicken stock canned yesterday. I ended with a grand total of seven quart jars, and eight pint jars of the finished product… Not too shabby. We had enough chicken carcasses left over to make another thirty quarts if only I had the time and/or the kitchen space. Our chest freezer in the basement is absolutely full to the hilt again; storing the carcasses and canning the stock was out of the question. We either need another chest freezer, or I am going to have to can the rabbit’s when we butcher them. Those little fuckers reproduce so fast… we have ran out of rabbit cage space, so waiting to butcher them is not really an option, but like I have already said, we had trouble shutting the freezer’s lid. I found an awesome sounding recipe in Backwoods Home Magazine for canning rabbit, and there is no better time to experiment with it than the present… maybe sometime next week.

                This weekend we have about a hundred pounds of honey to get processed and stored. For the record, that is a lot of honey. It is also very expensive honey. My dad has been keeping bees for well over ten years now, but like most of the hobby bee keepers in our area, he has trouble getting his hives to survive from year to year. This bee problem has been happening all over the country for a while now, and I have read an assortment of scientific theories as to what is killing off all of the bee population; theories range from cell phone towers and radio waves interfering with the bees radar, to the amount of insecticide that big agri-business is using to murder our environment. Either way, having to purchase new bees for the hives every year is a pricey hobby/endeavor, but the resulting honey is not only awesome, it is supposed to help people with allergies (something to do with the honey being made from the pollen of plants that are local to your specific area… I don’t know the details; I’m not a scientist or a nutritionist; I just love rock-star quality food of the gods, and that is what homegrown locally harvested honey is). That was a long way to go to tell you why we won’t be butchering our excess rabbits this weekend…

                I’ve already got the goats milked this morning, and I filtered, saved, and chilled the milk from the saanan. (The alpine kicked her bucket over… not a good start to the morning, but I took three deep breaths, threw a string of obscenities her way, and then all was well in the universe again…) My feta cheese cultures should be in the mail –I’m actually expecting them to arrive today- and I am super excited! I know I said I would stop promising shit on here, but I promise to recount the entire cheese making experience on here with photos and everything. This will be my first attempt ever at making cheese, so fingers crossed I don’t fuck it up.

                I won’t be getting much done outside again today. It was thunder storming all night (I love thunder storms, I know some people who hate them, and others who are afraid of them, but I love them), and it is supposed to continue on throughout the day. I was up well over half the night, listening to the thunder and the rain, tossing and turning and reveling in the fact that life is pretty awesome at the moment. The end result was I only got about two and half hours of sleep, so we will see how much I get accomplished today period. But, with that being said, I should get off this computer contraption and get back to work.

                Keep a look out for a photo update later on today… this is not a promise (I promise). I WILL post a photo update today; I have already taken all the pictures and downloaded them to my computer, I just have to get them all formatted and the captions written up.  Check back later.