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My Silver Appleyard ducks are starting to lay eggs.

Lots of eggs! They are fabulous to cook with.

Saturday for supper we had Duck Egg Belgian Waffles.

3 duck eggs

Separated. Look at those rich orangey yolks.

1 1/2 cups milk
5 tbsp butter
3 duck eggs yolks

Beat well.

2 cups of flour
3 tsp baking powder
1 tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp salt

Sifted.

Add sifted ingredients to the wet mix

Put the duck egg whites into a clean bowl.

Beat until stiff.

Fold the beaten egg whites into the batter mix.

Take your time. You want to keep the air in the batter.

Using a 1/4 cup measure I pour the batter on to a hot waffle iron. Close the lid gentley.

A few minutes later I open the lid.

Add butter and syrup while piping hot.

Supper anyone?

He is living in my turkey house!!

We dispatch and process our turkey the weekend before Thanksgiving. This year I chose broad breasted bronze's and grew them up from eggs to the beauties they are now.

On the ground we figured they were about 30 pounds or so for the largest ones.

All of those feathers make them look a lot bigger than they really are.

Or do they?

Dressed these birds are weighing in at over 40lbs. My scale won't go as high as it needs to weigh them accurately.

Thursdays centerpiece is a beauty.

It is in a 60 quart igloo cube cooler brining in sugar and salt and ice water.

Wednesday he will come out and be soaked in pure clean water. Later he will be brought up to room teperature in anticipation of the oven.

I finally managed to track down one very tiny nigerian dwarf female goat for my 10 year old to show for 4H over the next year.

We fell in love with her little chocolate brown face and markings. What's not to love about this little creature?

At 6 months old she is miniscule compared to my herd of saanan/nubian does. So far they have not accepted her into the herd. They push her away from the food and won't let her lay with them. Goats are serious about head butting. I am confident in about a week she will find her place in the herd.

She is learning to show us the diva inside of her with her new fashion accessories straight from the pooch isle at pet smart.

Before anyone remarks on her horns - we do NOT disbudd. Our county 4H allows horned goats to be shown at the fair. The counties around us do not but the one we live in does. Now that is progress, people.

I love sour dough bread. I love rustic grilled sandwiches made with thinly sliced meats and melty cheese. Nowhere in the world will you find better sour dough than in San Francisco but you can make awesome sour dough bread in your own kitchen from naturally occuring yeasts in the air. You just have to catch them!

1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk

Combine until smooth - I use a wire wisk.

Pour into a container that can sit on your countertop.

Loosely cover with cheese cloth or a dish cloth. The mix needs to breath. Wild yeast bacteria naturally occuring in the air we breath should make a home here and do all the work.

Look! I caught a wild yeast. Woot!!! It bubbles and rises. It is a living food culture.

See that line of liquid that is rising to the top? That is the 'hooch'. It is the fermented sugars we used to feed the yeast cultures. The mix does smell like rich beer. No worries! When you bake with it the alcohols cook away.

Every day the mix needs to be stirred. Every 5 days it needs to be fed. I feed it the same simple recipe - 1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk. After the first 10 days you can begin to bake with it. Lovely breads and sweets. Anything you can do with a yeast recipe you can do with this starter. You can search google and turn up tons of awesome easy recipes for your dough starter.

If you have trouble catching a yeast you can still make your own with some starter help. In your original recipe add 1 package of dry yeast dissolved in 1/4 cup warm water allowed to sit to for 10 minutes to activate. Then continue feeding the mixture the simple recipe above (1 cup bread flour, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup milk) every 5 days. On day 10 you begin cooking with it.

You much tend your starter. You must feed it. Without your TLC it will die. If you find yourself in a position where you have too much starter or you don't have time to use it you can freeze it. After having been frozen you will need to let it thaw and come up to room temerpature. Then you want to watch for it to be to activate again. You want to feed it and help it to grow. If you don't want to freeze it you can give it away by the cup full to your friends and neighbors.

Think about it. It is the perfect sharing food. You feed it and it feeds you and your family and your friends and their families.

Now go get busy. It will take you 2 minutes to make the mix. The rest of the work is done by nature.

Chop. Chop. Get to moving. I haven't asked you to do anything in a long time. ;)

Since late winter I have been busy doing some things on this little farm of ours. "Like what?" you may ask.

Well, let's see. We  have -

-built honey bee hives and installed 2 hives with queens.

- hatched geese (buff dewlap toulouse, grey dewlap toulouse, sebastopols, embdens and some mixed mutts)

- hatched ducks (silver appleyards)

- hatched chickens (blue/black/splash and buff orpingtons)

- hatched guineas (giant pearl)

- hatched turkeys (broad breasted and standard bronze)

- hatched coturnix quail (brown and golden)

- started a meat rabbitry - and seen the first mammals to be born on this little farm (Californian whites)

- bottle fed bucklings to sire my herd (2 nubian boers)

- got lambs (freisian milk sheep crosses)

- got a pig (pretty little hampshire girl)

- started a meal worm farm (for which to feed my quail)

- got kefir grains and culture my own kefir

- have scoby coming for my own kumbocha (yum living foods!)

What have you been doing?

She managed to hatch 2 chicks.

The other eggs she was sitting on where obviously scrambled during shipping.

Mom and babies are doing well. She has them out of the crate and enjoying the barn, chick feed and cool clean water.

I got rid of my big rooster when he went after Steven repeatedly without being provoked. So I didn't have any fertile eggs at all on the farm. Then I had a hen go broody - meaning she decided she was going to sit on some eggs until they hatched. Doh!

So I got a nice lady in Alabama to send me some of her beautiful rhode island red eggs. I put my broody hen - a big fat white wyandotte (one of the Wanda's) in a quiet place and put the eggs under her.

21 days later - look what is hiding under her wing -

Life on the farm is super busy right now. I have so much to tell you!

She doesn't know it is a red headed stepchild. All she knows is that it is her baby. :)

Well, not yet but maybe by next spring!

Look what the mail brought yesterday to the farm.

I have always wanted to have honeybees.

I want to learn how to bake using honey instead of refined sugar.

I want to be more self sufficient and self sustaining.

I think this spring I am making real headway to get there!

I am hatching eggs again today. All 8 Buff Orpingtons have hatched. 2 blue/black/splash Orpingtons have hatched with 8 more pipped and 2 very quiet unknowns.

This is real life.