Category: Kentucky

Sufferin’ Towel

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Paul finished his OB/GYN rotation a few weeks ago and apparently in labor and delivery a lot of ladies in labor ask for a sufferin’ towel.  It’s just a wet towel they put on your head, but I guess around here it has a special name.

So two days ago it was extra hot and Spike was definitely suffering, so I draped a wet towel over him to cool him off.  Usually when we try to dry him off with a towel he freaks out and shakes it and runs around the house with it in his mouth.  But today, he left it on his back and walked around the house with it on for like 10 minutes.

He LOVES his sufferin towel.

Jammin

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It’s starting to look like…

…like Spike got a new football jersey!  (because his old one was too small).  And he is HAP-PY.

School’s back in session, the football stadium PA system is back up and running (you can hear it from our house, Spike flips every time, so that’s fun), and on Sunday I ran for over an hour with J and didn’t even feel like I was going to keel over and die from heat.  I put a SWEATSHIRT on Saturday morning.

You know what all of this means.  Fall’s coming.

And what do you do during the fall in Kentucky (aside from chase bourbon and line up for Midnight Madness so you can live in a tent on campus for a week before the acutal event)?

Make jam!  (I know it’s still August, but Paul’s working 24 hour shifts and I figured it’d be good practice.)

So, full disclosure, these are not our strawberries.  Our strawberry bush in the back of the yard suffered the same tininess problem as our raspberries this year.  So these came from the farmers market.

First step was to pull out and dust off the country living bible.

It has about 30 recipes for various types of jams, jellies, and preserves.  Of course. Strawberry jam had 2 ingredients and 4 steps.  Decision made.

We already had all the gear (big pot, lids, tops, jars, tongs, rack, etc) which had been used for a lot of pickling.  But no preserves yet.

First, wash.  Then hull.

First attempt I tried to hull with the apple corer.  Stupid.  Don’t do that.  Use a butter knife.

Then you take the berries and you mash ’em, you mash ’em (Molly, name that song.)

Then it’s time for ingredient #2: sugar!  Mix some of that in.

Try not to lose your spoon in the mush.

Then comes the fun part: dump the whole thing in a pot…

..and start stirring.

Stir and stir and stir some more, so it doesn’t burn, until it starts to boil.  Then…keep stirring!

During this time I started sterilizing the jars and lids.  Also started boiling the big pot of water for the final sterilization process. Also realized why this is a cold weather activity (I was sweating profusely.)

Then, when the jam was thick (almost an hour and a half of stirring later….seriously.  Fortunately my sister in law gave me the password for her HBO GO so I could watch Girls the whole time), I pulled the jars and lids out of the oven, dumped the jam in them jars, screwed the lids on (but not super tight), and threw them in the boiling water for 10 minutes.

The water should be about 2 inches above the top of the jars (so ignore that big one sticking out).  Then took them out for the REALLY exciting part, where you hear the jars suction themselves shut as they cool.

Then…jam.

It looks a little…foamy.  Maybe I was supposed to scrape that off the top?  Reading directions has never been my forte.  We’ll find out when we taste it.

For those of you who don’t own The Book and want more sophisticated instructions than “mash the berries and stir”, there are a million recipes online (like here and here and here, from my friend Neeley.)

Speckle

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So, turns out no training life is boring life for the blog.  What is NOT at all boring is what has been happening in the chicken coop.

Yes. That’s right.  On a rainy Sunday where I stayed  in the kitchen for 6 hours cooking two meals and baking zuchinni bread so I could pretend like I was being productive while I watched 10 straight hours of Breaking Bad (don’t think this story can get more exciting?  Just wait. ) I went out into the coop to get the eggs, and found that one of the chickens had finally…laid an egg in the doghouse!

Victory.  Paul: 1, Chickens: 0.

The egg I pulled from the house was way more speckled than usual.

I thought that was weird and was wondering what might have caused the change.  After some extensive research (Google) I came across this National Geographic article that suggests that the speckles on the shells of bird eggs may be caused by certain compounds known as protoporphyrins, which often shows up in eggs from birds that are calcium deficient to assist in strengthening the shells.

The birds discussed in the NG article were great tits (serious), so I tried to see if it’s the same for chickens.  There actually isn’t a whole lot written about that, but the little I did find points to the same answer.

Time to start spiking the chicken feed with One-A-Day Women’s multivitamins.

Farm Update

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“‘MERICA, F**K YEAH!” say the chickens

Paul put a little addition on the chicken coop.

Aaaah, rain.  It is raining this morning.  We got a few afternoon storms mid-week and the heat finally started to mellow out, thank goodness.  Without our usual rain everything was starting to get all brown and parched…and look a lot like California.  I was worried the garden wasn’t going to make it.  Our flowers out front are dried husks of what they used to be.

So sad and ugly.  That used to be a beautiful big blue delphinia bush.  Some of the herbs took a serious beating from the heat too, especially the cilantro.

Our back lawn is brown, which is gross.  And the chickens eggs the past few days have been smaller than usual, which is weird, so I’m blaming that on the weather too.

Speaking of the chickens, the whole time we’ve had them they have laid their eggs in their respective places: Romy is usually in the corner in a nest, and Michelle has been laying them from her perch in the coop.  Yesterday morning I went out and found this:

Aw, nest love.

But not all is lost in our garden.  The basils and oregano are hanging in there.

…and of course, the tomatoes.  We had our first real harvest the other day.

They’re still small and they have a seriously weird shape with a pointy end, but they are tasty.  And the Kentucky Colonel mint is kickin ass and taking names.  That stuff grows like a weed.  And with the rain scheduled to hang around this weekend, I’m hoping by next week things will start to perk up again.

This weekend we continue 2012: Year of the Airplane.  Tonight Paul and I are hopping on a flight…TOGETHER…out to CA.  He is done with boards (but his scores don’t come back till next week…so don’t bring it up) and we are spending a week at my parents place where my plans consist of laying in the sun and eating avocados.

But first, off to U of L to take a final for an online class I’ve been taking. Don’t be too jealous.

The 4th

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The 4th of July is quickly becoming one of my favorite days of the year.  And I don’t even like fireworks.

First off, they line the entire main street in town with these little tiny American flags.  I have no idea how long it took someone to do this.

Secondly, Wednesday off work.  WHATTUP.

Then of course was the BG 10K.

I ran the race last year as part of an 11 mile training run.  This year, my long training runs are over (YESS!!) and I haven’t done a very good job at keeping my running up to par, so this time around it was just for fun.

To make things even more fun, it was almost 80 degrees with 87% humidity at 7am.

My entire in-law family did the race.  Paul ran with his dad, and my sister-in-law and ran with their mom.  I ran with my friend J whose goal was to not walk at all (she has been known to take this race out a little too fast) or barf before mile 4.

the starting line

I absolutely love love love this race.  To me, it embodies the all of the good things about living in small-town America.  Most of the run is through downtown and on one main tree-lined road.  Everybody and their mother is out, either running or hungover on the side of the road supporting somebody.  The entire course is lined with people cheering and little kids holding signs and the owners of the houses along the route hosing you down.  There is a band at mile 4 wearing boating hats and that plays When the Saints Go Marching In.  Everyone is in a good mood.  Every time I run this I feel like I’m in a movie.

Anyway, J and I made our way down the vomit-lined chute (the heat was a problem) without walking once.  There was also no barfing, and she PRed by like 2 minutes.  Win.

For my sister-in-law, 10K was the furthest distance she had ever run by like 2 miles.  She came in at just over an hour…and ralphed at the finish line.  Another win.

Because the temperature just kept going up and up, after the run we headed over my sister-in-law’s boyfriend’s mother’s pool (get that?) where we lounged around and his mom served us post-race spiked lemonade and snacks.  It was…amazing.

And of course the evening ended with America-inspired dessert.

Special shout out to my sister who is serving over in Afghanistan and celebrated the 4th by getting beat in a 5K run by a bunch of Spaniards at her base.  I asked her how it was and she said, “Hot.”   Which probably trumps the hot we felt here.

Eggciting

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Nice job ladies.  First week, 10 eggs.  2 eggs a day, just like clockwork.

All of the eggs are brown, though one of them is laying eggs that are spotted, slightly bigger, slightly darker…and strangely reminiscent of the spotted sun in this picture from NASA APOD yesterday of the super moon.

Romy has also established herself as the head of the roost. Michele is pretty dumb, even for a chicken, but she’s easy to catch and pick up and put her where you need her to be.

the excitement never ends.  happy weekend.

They’re heeeeeere…

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First of all, before we talk poultry, this weekend was Cinco de Derby.  After a 3 hour bike ride outside with Allison, I headed down to a new brewery that just opened up in town where a lot of this…

…and this

was going on.  (Yes, that’s a bottle of Elijah Craig 12 year she’s pulling out of her purse at the taco truck.)   The tacos were DEEELicious.  And then a Mexican jockey won the Derby, which was appropriate.

Then on Sunday, after a year-long saga, guess what I found sitting in a box when I came home from coaching.

Meet Romy and Michele.

A family acquaintance has a whole flock of chickens and said she’d be happy to give us two to “try out”.  If we still want them in a week we pay her $16 for the two of them.  So these two are year-ish old hens that have been laying eggs for a few months.  Perfect.

You may remember our coop from the spring.

It’s small and humble, but total cost was $14 for scrap lumber at Home Depot, $16 for chicken wire, and $4 for hinges.  We were fortunate enough to have an almost-certified architect home for spring break (Paul’s brother Karl) who designed and helped build the whole thing.

During the day we’re going to let the ladies out to wander around that back area, which is fenced in and has a million grubs to eat.  At night they go in the coop, where there’s still enough room to strike a pose.

The arrival of chickens also meant a big trip to one of the best stores in town.

I seriously love this place and am always blown away by the employees’ farm knowledge.  And yes, that is an animal hedge cut into the shape of a horse wearing a decorative flower wreath under the sign.  And no, we didn’t get a limited edition University of Kentucky knife.

After picking up some hay for the egg laying box, a 50lb bag of chicken feed (that was the smallest they had, should last us…oh, 5 years), and some pine wood chips…plus a few other plants were not on the shopping list (this always happens, it’s like the Target of garden stores), we headed back to finish accessorizing the coop.

Paul, being the resourceful guy that he is, hammered together a makeshift feeding trough for them, but they keep knocking it over, so we still have to figure that out.  For water we actually bought a slow drip chicken water thing from SS, which was a good call.  (Apparently a chicken can drink up to a pint of water a day.  Who knew?)  The big challenge will be to see if they can figure out how to crawl up the ladder into the roosting area to sleep.

So, how is our other farm animal dealing with this?

Pretty much like that.  He spends a lot of time doing this.

Fortunately there’s no way he can break through that fool-proof gate wrapped in chicken wire being held up by a piece of plywood and a rock!  (We’re working on the fence.)  We did hold him up to a chicken and he just smelled it, didn’t try to bite.  So that’s a good sign?  I think more than anything he’s just curious why all of our attention was not focused on him yesterday.

One other thing is when you look out into our backyard…

Magical hidden chicken farm.  The coop is in a shaded space behind the garage and the big tree in the right hand corner…which is actually really nice because we don’t have to worry about them getting too too hot in the summer.

That’s all for now, we’ll see if they survive the first few days.

The end.

Grow grow grow

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So, first, some less than stellar news (for me, at least).  I woke up Thursday so sick that I was not able to drive down to Florida with Allison for the race this weekend.  So for me, the race is off, which is a bummer.  But what can you do.

Now, onto the good news.

Plants!

They say in Kentucky that you shouldn’t plant anything in the ground until after Derby (first weekend of May).  We had some crazy warm weather for most of the month of March, followed by sub-freezing nights last few weeks.  When the warm weather stuck around for so long, a coworker of mine who likes to talk horticulture with me decided to disregard the Derby rule this year and planted his tomatoes in his gardenbed.  Last week his tomatoes took a turn for the worse.

So, as much as a rail on Paul’s greenhouses, his most recent one seems to be doing the job and these little plants seem to be loving their new pots.  Check out those basils.

Chicken update

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We live in Kentucky.  Home of Tyson and the Kentucky State Fair. Chickenlandia.  …OR SO YOU’D THINK!  Apparently it’s more complicated to get yourself some chickens here than I would have guessed.

First, we were going to get chicks.  I was excited about this because chicks are adorable.

Then we found out you can’t “sex” the chicks (determine their gender…I know, I wish they’d use a different word too) until their feathers come in.  So, if we don’t want roosters (which we don’t, they aren’t allowed in residential areas), we need to get pullets (not poulets), or young hens that have just started laying eggs.

So Paul did some research, which included perusing the Kentucky chicken classifieds and posting messages on Cluck, the Lexington Chicken “Coop”erative Facebook wall.  So far he has not been able to find anywhere that will sell you 3 sexed pullets.  He’s putting his money on Saturday’s Southern States Chicken and Small Animal Swap, where he is hoping someone will be willing to swap him 3 chickens for money instead of another chicken.  Unfortunately, I will be in Oregon and won’t be swapping any small animals.

So, despite the setbacks, we are still full steam ahead on Operation: Poultry.  I have, in fact, been driving around with a huge gas grill box in the back of the car for the past 2 weeks.  Everyone is like, “Oh no way!  You guys got a grill??”  Nope.  It’s a box for our chickens.  That Paul will pick up at the chicken swap Saturday.

Fingers crossed.

Update:  the chicken swap got rained out.