Blue_Egg_Farmer

Dominic's latest adventure took him through Florance and his anscestral home of Norcia. His story is just wonderful, the pictures breathtaking and the food amazing. The latest updated link is http://www.blueeggfarm.com/dc3

You are brave people to try and eat it. I had no idea it was food until right now. The fungus pops up once in a while in our gardens, for us it is something that a kid will pick and chase the others around with. It is on the order of holding slugs or getting hit on the head with a chicken poop, something very unpleasant. So what does it taste like?

Love that chicken picture!!! very nice. Anyway, I get to process my own chickens, ducks and geese. Immediately on either side of the gizzard is the soft pink tubing, one end goes up and out of the body cavity to the crop. The crop is the pouch infront of the chickens body that holds food until it is ready to be digested. The other end of the tubing on the gizzard is connects into the liver, gallbladder and intestines. The liver in a healthy bird is usually a nice dark reddish brown,divided into 3 lobes and pretty large, equal to or greater than the size of the gizzard, If the bird was ill the liver will be light or even grayish. This is not counting foie gras which is totally different looking. Tucked inbetween the lobes of the liver is the gallbladder, it is smallish (the tip of your little finger) and may look blackish or very dark green. It contains a yellowish/greenish liquid called bile and is considered inedible. It needs to be removed from the liver carefully, if it leaks onto the meats it will instantly stain it and give it a bad taste. After this whole grouping of gizzards the tubing from the liver on down and out is the intestines. Back at the top of the chicken or duck separate from the liver stuff is the heart and lungs, the lungs are securely attached to the birds back, the heart loosely attached inbetween the lungs. Back down to the bottom back of the carcass is the kidneys, some of the kidneys are removed but much of it is actually house under the back bones.

Maybe they could start simple with lunch meat.... make it be dispensable like toilet tissue. As it would be coming germ free maybe it could be set up on a dispenser roll over the counter where the bread and paper plates are to make sandwiches and ripped off as needed. Truthfully I do not think I want to touch the stuff, I have a terrible feeling that it would cause a new type of mad cow disease or it gets into your body and starts growing into your cells or something like from the Alien movie or the Blob. I'm sticking with the real meat and foie gras I grow right here .

Well so far I have made an apple pie using the lard in the crust. Suprisingly it came out much better than any of my other pie making attempts!!! ( I am the most uncoodinated non cooking type person born) Boy, what a little lard can do, flaky / tender and completely edible came out the crust!! Next will be the cornbread with crunchies, I can't wait! And Sunny, do not be jealous, they did make a lot of dirt, and did get out and terrorize the horses and chickens several time, they were smart and strong, they could easily push down or dig under any fencing. When I moved them into a stall during a thunderstorm they dug up the floor and ate the wood walls, they tried to knock me down and I swear would have eaten me. During all the trouble I would say never again, we will just stick with our poultry and beef cattle but now that they are safely in the freezer and have been proclaimed the best tasting pork we have ever had ( my chef buddy even said the loin chops I gave him were better than the berkshire pork he orders!) and we have a better understanding of how to handle piggies ( definitely not like raising beef) I will devise a better plan for raising these critters.

So this was our very first year of raising swine on the Blue Egg Farm. It wasn’t so bad and next spring I think I would try it again, though at times earlier in the year I was afraid of the piggies. I was told some scary stories about how pigs are omnivores and eat anything, then about someone kinda local who got his leg bitten pretty badly and needed over 100 stitches, that’s about when I notice our pigs growing small tusks and trying to “taste” my arms and legs when I was in with them, but fortunately I got over my fear…kinda...as long as I was outside with the piggies they were more interested in rolling through the mud instead of chasing me down. The big day came last weekend, the butcher came and picked up the hogs and magically transformed them into frozen roasts and steaks which I picked up Friday. Our butcher said my son did a great job raising them over the summer, that they were the perfect weight and cut beautifully. It is amazing how we could go from a tamsworth and yorkshire hog to food. I cooked a couple loin chops, they seemed to be the best we ever had, but we could just be a bit partial. With all the great meat I also asked to get back the fat, so yesterday I rendered about 7 pounds of the raw fat (like in the top of the picture) and in about 2 hours I had several tins of lard and a big bowl of crunchies. The picture I have linked above shows the big bowl of crunchies and the tins of lard in several states of cooling. The hottest tins are still yellowish liquid, as it gets cooler and more solid it turns white. I want to try to make something with the crunchies, any ideas? They are disappearing quick, Already munchers are walking through the kitchen grabbing handfuls. As for the lard, today I will try to make a pie, got to go out and shake my mcIntosh and wine sap trees now to see what I get. See ya later.

caterpillars in the corn is a good sign, it means that the farmer did not use pesticides...or at least not a lot of pesticides. I use zero pesticides organic or otherwise so yes we have caterpillars, we just cut that part off and enjoy

Thank you all so much for you help I am finally getting edumacated with this subject, should have asked about 10 years ago when I started raising geese...but here I am now alearnin and sorry but now I have more questions. So I see the foie gras is something that can be messed up easily if not done properly so I started looking up how to process it after I get it out of the goose. I will leave the cooking to my chef buddies, one of them should know what to do, and if not, I know they must know someone who does. So it is like fat? When I process a goose I get a lot of abdomenal fat from them and save it in the freezer for some of my folks who like to fry potatoes in goose fat. Does the foie gras taste like that? I found one website that gave directions on how to devein the foie gras, on the same page it said that only duck foie gras is (grown...made) in the U.S. and NO goose foie gras is (grown ...made) is made in the U.S. That all the goose stuff is either processed in cans or frozen and shipped to the U.S. Is that correct? If it is not allowed to be made I had no idea. Anyway, my geese are happily slurping away inbetween bathing/ grooming sessions in the pools, grazing the back 40 and sleeping. And I hate to say it , but I do not know what a umami is . If it is a bad word that is all you need to say, it is a bad word .

And I kept knocking off the huge side view mirrors.

Thank you all for your help. One more not so gifted question. Foie Gras is always cooked. Right? It is not eaten raw?

Ahhhh yes, the Panzarotti, my favorite delivery vehicle, thing got there quick but too many eggs broke so I had to trade it in for something alittle slower.

I have 15 or so toulouse geese that have been invited to various Christmas Dinners around town. As it only takes 2 weeks to go the extra step and make a foie gras also I was wondering what does foie gras tastes like? You would think that since I actually handled some from my own geese I would have tried it...but I chickened out. The only thing close I think I have had to compare it with is chicken liver that was cooked with onions for several hours when I was little. To me it was a very bad taste, sort of like a mushy metal taste. And no I do not need to force a tube or funnel down their beaks. They are self stuffing at this time of year, they will eat n eat n eat out of a bucket till they fall asleep.

I also had a hard time understanding what panzanella was before my chef buddy made one for me. Before he showed me what it was, in my mind I would hear and see this.....

Darn that pollen drifting off the neighbors fields!!!

Have you ever looked forward to tasting something only to find out it really isn't what you thought? Goose liver - I do not think is either goose or liver. Chicken scampie - I do not think there was any scampie in it. Here is my idea of chicken scampie