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

MMmmmm bacon

TAPrice writes: "Ever been to a state fair? What would you call what's taking place at the livestock auctions?" In our state the auction at the fair is for FFA and 4H children it is called Junior Fair. The kids raise meat animals, pamper them, learn about them, take tests about their animal, then at the fair they are in competition for showmanship ( how well they can handle their animal and how much knowledge they possess about it) then the animal themselves get judged to see how well they have grown over the summer or year, then they have an auction to sell the childrens animals. The meat that comes from these animals is usually of the highest quality since the childen must work with the animals on an individual basis every day, take them for walks to tone up, keep them clean,washing and brushing all the time, feed them the highest quality feed ( which usually happens to the most expensive), and they must abide by the rules of no hormones or steroids or anything that will cause the animal to bulk up unnaturally, testing will be done and cheater caught. The children first have to invite buyers, they hand write letters with photos of them with their animal to businesses or individuals. In hopes that someone will bid. The prices will go high for some lucky children, others will get the preset "buyers club price" (maybe they forgot to send out their letters...they are kids after all). The auction is a win win situation. The children will get money to put toward a new project animal or to save for school. The buyer will get extremely high quality meat ,a tax right off ( the junior fair auction is tax deductable) and get free advertizing on the radio and in the paper. And if the buyer donates the livestock back to the auction so that the child gets another round with his animal or donates the livestock to Harvest for Hunger they get a double tax deduction. That is what is going on with the fair auction. It is for the kids, not the average market vendor. If anyone here is interested in the healthiest quality meat possible I would encouage you to bid at the junior fair, you will get the best meat you ever had and be helping a child earn money and feel good about being a small farmer at the same time.

Yes, I believe some will, I have set up at my share of both farmers markets and flea markets. After careful observation over time I noticed that many of the hagglers themselves were also vendors, not your average customer. They were the people that go to a garage sale early and start into and argument over how your box of LPs or books isn't worth the box they are packed in, talk you down , then take all that stuff to their flea market stand and put prices on each item that reflect "collectable or antique" pricing. ( found this out when my mom had a garage sale) Just try to haggle with that guy now!!! This type of person is also the one that will go down to (name your most inexpensive store here) in a pickup and load up on vegetables, peel off the stickers, go to the farmers market with those veggies and say they are their own home grown veggies. Caught one vendor that used to be very friendly to me, he forgot to take the sticker off his peppers one morning, I held up a beautiful orange pepper one day with a store sticker on it, he grabbed it away and never spoke to me again! One woman at the flea market was particularly crafty, going to fast food restaurants and always finding something wrong with her half finished meal to get a replacement, she was very proud of the fact and would have stories of naughty things she had done every weekend. The same folks every week with the same talk, for these people it is a way of life. Being able to say no to these people did help toughen me up alittle bit because they would and did talk me down to nothing in the beginning. But after one summer of trying the markets I learned that it just wasn't where I wanted to be. Too much hard work and time and money was wasted that summer. It did teach me about people though.

Yes they are

My friend Chef Cerino at Carrie Cerinos uses Guanciale in his Spaghetti Carbonara. It has a richer flavor than regular bacon, a little goes a long way. Here is the restaurant website. Click on the picture of spaghetti carbonara and you will be taken to a page detailing the use of guanciale also on this page there is a link to his guanciale provider. http://www.carriecerinos.com/main/main.asp

I am not a cook but I do know about chickens. Before the age of 16 weeks both young males ( cockerals) and females( pullets) are very similar in flavor. After 16 weeks the birds begin to mature, the males (called cock or rooster now) will become stronger flavored ( more chickeny) and the meat tougher, usually too tough for eating and the skin much tougher - like leather, but still the male is a great ingredient for making very flavorful broths, soups, and the meat sometimes used chopped up small for meaty, chewy bits in things like pot pie. The females ( now called hens) will remain milder in flavor than the male but more flavorful than a younger bird, have more fat than the males, will keep softer skin, but will also become alittle firmer but not inedible, so will make a fine slow roaster, soup, paprikash or stew.

I do not know how this would be as I haven't tried it yet, but around St. Patricks Day some of my chef buddies would pick up eggs to put in or on guiness beer. Maybe some type of beer would make a good liquid?

Haggling is one of the reasons I do not like to set up at a farmers market. I am a farmer/artist - that is my occupation, my calling if you will, to work quietly, independently and artistically with nature on our farm. But just like everyone else in the U.S. I am working to earn a living wage, put money away for the future, pay taxes, put my kids through school, pay insurance, medical and dental, make repairs or replace items around the home and business, you name the bill, I have one too. I set my prices for a liveable income and that is it. So for a soft spoken farmer/artist such as myself a farmers market where haggling is going on is a nightmare. But that is just me, my artistic side feels rejected by people poking at things I have created from the earth, in an attempt to shame me into a lower price, I would rather just pack up and go home and eat the veggies and eggs myself. But at the same time there are some farmers out there that are born to be entertaining salesmen and welcome the chance to engage in a friendly haggling session, that is their calling.

Before an egg leave the hen it is coated with a clear protective sealant called the bloom. The bloom seals the pores of the eggshell enough that in most instances bacteria can not get into the egg....it is the eggs first and most important line of defence, and part of the reason an unwashed egg can sit out in a nest box for 3 weeks fertile or unfertile and not go bad. Large producers, anyone with more than 500 laying hens, must by law wash their eggs. In the process the bloom is scrubbed off, opening the egg up to infection. next is the wash, it is usually at this point that samenella is spread from one egg to the next, while the egg is being bathed in the warm - (by law the temperature of the water must be 20 degrees higher than the egg), clorinated , recycled no more than 3 times, dirty wash water- the water splashs around to other eggs nearby and the bacteria it contains will find a nice new home. ( Think of a hot tub in a public gym - lots of healthy people, skin pores opening in the nice warm water then maybe someone real sick gets in - you just pray that there was enough clorine in that water before you had a chance to scamper out) After the wash the eggs are resealed with a tasty coating of mineral oil and perhaps a powdering ( they used to use talcum powder, now I believe if they powder the eggs it is with cornstarch, some do , some don't). So now it is all clean again right? Maybe, maybe not. It depends who that egg was bathing with. Now laser etching is now involved the spots the laser lands will for a millisecond open the pores of the egg again, "pushing in" what ever was on the surface of the egg. It might only be in microscopic amounts but if it happens to land on an egg that was washed with samanella in the water, and it was on it's 3rd rinse ( the clorine has by then started to loose its disinfecting strength) it could potentially be giving that egg samanella.

Aside form the advertising aspect, the more steps and the more complicated they make getting the egg from the hen to the table, the great chance there is of the egg becoming contaminated with bacteria.