First shots day!

Are you my dad?

Mom, and half the litter.

Holy crap! What is that noise?

They've not been out of the dog house until today and a tractor firing up scared them.

DW holds a wooly bear!

First shots. The pups will be going to new homes in a week or so.

More noodles!

These egg noodles are so pale compared to the earlier batches. Except for the dough I added a mix of paprika to. I so dislike dull, pale noodles!

I also used a mix of lard and olive oil in the dough with the paprika. I'm curious to see how lard affects texture and taste. If I like the result I can buy fatback and render it easily enough and I use the cracklings in various meals so there is no waste. Fatback is $.99 a pound and 2 pounds looks to make as much lard as to equal 17 ounces of olive oil at $7 or more a bottle!

I know lard is supposed to be unhealthy, but as I'm going to die anyway I intend to enjoy my food until that moment. That, and I'm skeptical of the food industry's pushing vegetable fats as safer than animal ones. As I can't figure out whose telling truths or half truths, I'll follow my grandparents who lived into their 80s and 90s using lard!

Homemade egg noodles, or why I suffer gluten allergies!

These pats of dough were made with Pillsbury "all-purpose" flour. It may well be bleached and lacking everything supposedly contained in whole wheat, but I've found the flour allows the flavor of the eggs to shine! The eggs I used to make the dough were from free range/grass fed chickens. That type of egg flavor is what I'm after in a noodle!

The dozen great eggs I started with made 4 batches of noodles when I added a commercial egg to each batch. The commercial eggs I bought from a local egg house. They are the best eggs I can find at a price I can afford. They make a fair egg noodle on their own, but free range/grass fed eggs are simply superior!

The noodles on the left have begun to dry. The noodle rack hangs over an electric baseboard heater in the kitchen. They might be dry enough to bag by this evening, but I've learned to let them hang overnight if I'm going to store them rather than eat them right away. There is little joy in placing pounds of noodles in a container to use months later and then find them moldy because they weren't really dry!

Three batches of these noodles are heading to Florida as a Christmas gift for my friend La P. The other batch I'm sending back to the people who supplied the eggs. Maybe they'll like the noodles enough to supply me with eggs in exchange for noodles?

I used to sell the noodles and had enough customers to set me to thinking about buying a commercial mixer and turning a room in the house into a drying room. Then I got to thinking on what might happen when the county and state finally showed up demanding I get legal with inspections and permits. I'm a maker, I don't work well with takers. The only way to get the noodles now is to be a friend.

Frozen, but not forgotten!

I found these in the freezer while I was hunting something else. I think they are at least two years old. They were given to me by DW's aunt who got them from some organic grower across the state line from us. I tossed them in the freezer for desperate times as they had little flavor compared to the small harvest I'd lifted from our own little garlic bed that season.

Desperate times are defined by a lack of good garlic! Like, when all of ours has been eaten or planted, and all our garlic guru's stock has been sold or sown. These are desperate times in deed!

As bland as this garlic was years ago I find the brightly colored wrappers at least interesting. I've read that certain varieties of garlic, like certain wines, take time to fully develop their flavor. These seem to be such, though two years frozen may have helped them along in that regard.

Whatever they are, they are better than anything I can get from a supermarket!

UPDATE! 12/09/10

Duh, I put the culled bulbs from this summer's harvest in the freezer! (Senility steadily eats away!) The good news? Even the frozen, homegrown culls are better than supermarket fresh!