Big Pink Farm

What's the difference between white eggs and brown eggs?  Do you have a preference?  Almost everyone I have ever met has a prejudice of some sort when it comes to eggs.  I'm here to tell you that there is one truly HUGE difference between white and brown eggs.  Ready?

White eggs are white and brown eggs are brown.

I'm sorry.  I couldn't resist.  Okay, the truth is that there is absolutely no significant difference between the two beside the color of their shells.  None whatsoever.  So when you buy eggs from our hens, you are getting eggs rich in healthy Omega-3 fatty acids.  Our hens, which lay both white and brown eggs, are allowed to roam free, and as such, supplement their diet with whatever tasty tidbits they scratch up in the pasture.  Their yolks are richly colored various shades of orange (not that anemic-looking yellow you'll find in the eggs that factory-farmed hens lay).

Just for fun, we took a bunch of photographs one recent morning as we were cooking breakfast.  In each example, there is an egg from a white shell and one from a brown shell in the frying pan.  Can you see any difference?  Which is the white egg?  Which is the brown?

And once you cover it with cheese, nothing much matters anymore.  Mmm, cheese!

I have a secret.  Ok, it's not really a secret now that I'm about to tell you:

Houston, we have a soap page!

I was overly optimistic when I announced my plans for the page way back in January.  I mean, how hard could it be?  Famous last words...  Anyway, we're up and running with it.  Thanks for your patience!

Speaking of soap, I thought I'd share a couple of photos of the soapmaking process.  In this one, you see the warm coconut, palm, and olive oils awaiting the addition of a goat milk/lye mixture.

After adding the goat milk/lye soup in a slow stream and stirring like crazy the whole time, the saponification process begins.  When it's done, it looks like pudding and is ready to be poured into the mold.  Like this:

After that I put it in a warm place until the next day when I carefully unmold it.  Then Roger cuts it into big bars and sets it aside to cure.  A few weeks later, this is what it looks like:

Now you know.  Cool, huh?

I keep thinking spring will arrive for good.  It will, it just has to!  This morning during chores I convinced myself that the pastures are greening up a little.  They are, I swear!

Yesterday was rainy and dreary, so I stayed inside for most of it and played Queen of the Kitchen.  (Except for the hour or so spent outside chasing baby goats with Max.  Most of them don't like to be caught, and half of them are more agile and wily than football players.  More agile than gazelles, even.)

Last year's garden produced 8 tons of cayenne and habanero peppers, and I'm only slightly exaggerating.  I dutifully dried them out for long-term storage in my handy-dandy food dehydrator, and now I have a lifetime supply of really hot peppers.  What didn't get dehydrated got turned into relish, hot sauces, and even jam.  Good thing Roger and Max both crave really hot condiments.

Yesterday, as Queen of the Kitchen, I made more hot sauce with some of the dried cayennes and a couple of the habaneros.  I was curious if the process would differ any from using fresh peppers.  The good news is that the results taste the same, but because the peppers were dried this time, I didn't have to get all freaked out about the hot oils getting on my skin and wear gloves up to my elbows and try really hard not to rub my eyes absent-mindedly.

I took pictures.  I'm kind of a dork.

 
But wait!  There's more!  Milk production is really starting to take off now that all the dairy does have kidded, so yesterday I made cheese.  Here's the curd just after it has been cut.

Here's Calvin, my little helper, next to my makeshift cheese press after the cooked and drained curds have been loaded into it for the first light pressing.  Before it was done, the cheese got flipped and pressed two more times with increasing weight.  And behold, this is what we have this morning, a little more than 2 pounds of fresh cheese.  I'll let it age for a few weeks before we dig in.  So yummy!

I have other photos of mundane happenings around the farm (like the baby turkeys that arrived two days ago!), but I'll save those for another post on another day.

Isn't it lovely?  Nothing beats the creaminess of lather from goat milk soap.  That's Peppermint/Rosemary soap, just about ready for packaging.  I will be adding a soap page to the website soon.  Maybe next week, after I get back from a brief vacation with just the baby to the artic tundra.  Roger and the other children will keep the farm running along for a few days while I visit my out of town family.  In the arctic.  Ok, it's not really above the artic circle, but the weather forecast says it might as well be.