Out the Front Door: Chicken Love

Snapshots of the beautiful, crazy world right out our front door.  If you’d like to share some of your own photos, please leave a link in the comments! 

After months of living a small cardboard box and chicken tractor, our chickens are finally free ranging.  It is so nice to have their presence on the land and to benefit from their tick-eating!  The kids are completely enthralled, watching “chicken TV” for hours, holding them gently in their laps, and feeding them from their hands. Our little piece of land is slowly becoming a homestead.

Setting Up: An Outdoor Kitchen

Week One of living on the land. It has been so wonderful.  Truly, just so lovely to fall asleep here each night, listening to the sounds of owls, crickets, frogs, and birds.  So nice to stay late after dinner without worrying about rushing back to town to get the kids fed and put to bed.  So easy to wake up in the morning and jump right into the tasks at hand.

The biggest task this week has been setting up our outdoor kitchen. Imagine trying to fit the contents of your home kitchen into an outdoor space, in a neat, organized, weather-proof, and critter-proof way. Imagine cooking all your meals almost entirely from scratch without hot running water, refrigeration, or the type of cook stove or oven you’re used to.  This is what some of our neighbors have been doing for years, and this is our new reality.

Brian and I love cooking.  We love spending time in the kitchen.  So creating an outdoor kitchen that is truly functional and also beautiful was a high priority.  And let me state from the start that I can claim absolutely no credit for the wonder you are about to see.  It is the result of the talent and hard work of my husband Brian, an artist, blacksmith and builder, who loves nothing more than to spend hours creating incredible structures from materials we have at hand.

The Outdoor Kitchen is tucked just to the west of our blue roofed house, and nestled underneath an oak tree.

The most amazing feature: running water!  We have four 50 gallon barrels set up to catch rain water from our roof.  Brian piped it under the house and up to this sink.  Instant cold water!  (We filter the drinking water through a Berkey filter.)

Where we do our cooking!  To the left is your standard-issue Coleman white gas stove.  To the right is a StoveTec rocket stove.

Cooking our breakfast in my monkey pajamas!  We usually fire up both stoves to cook a meal.  The rocket stove gets pretty sooty, so we have pots designated just for rocket stove use.  In the background, you can see that we’ve laid some planks down in the blue house for a covered dining area.

This tent trailer is our temporary home – so cozy and wonderful.  But the most important part of this photo is to the right – our Sun Oven.  Sun Ovens are absolutely incredible. I have made stews, rice, quinoa, and heated hot water, just by taking advantage of the beautiful sunny days we’ve been having.  The only disadvantage: Sun Ovens really don’t work on a cloudy or rainy day like today.

Thanks for joining me on this tour of our new outdoor kitchen. If you have any questions, please ask away!
Teri

 

Shared with The Backyard Farming Connection, Homestead Bloggers Network, and Homestead Barn Hop.

Out the Front Door

 Join me in celebrating the beautiful, crazy, messy life that happens right outside our front door: Post a link to a moment you’d like to share in the comments below,
or share it on the Homestead Honey Facebook page.

*** We’re moving on to the land tomorrow – for real this time!  I need a bit of extra energy focused on setting up our kitchen and sleeping space, so I’m going to take a few days away from this space.  Wishing you a wonderful beginning to your week!  – Teri

 

Sometimes…

…Things don’t work out exactly as you’ve planned.
Remember this cute perky tent?  The one we were just days away from calling home?

With a little strong wind and heavy rain, the tent now looks like this:

Yes, we are all safe.  No, we were not in the tent.  We had just climbed into our car to safely wait out the storm, and minutes later watched the tent crumble to the ground in a swirl of wind and rain.

Which means that our move to the land is postponed for a wee bit while we figure out the best solution.  Buy a new tent?  Quickly build a roofed tent platform?  Purchase an old RV or bus in which to sleep?

One thing is for sure about building a homestead.  It is anything but boring!

Have a wonderful weekend,
Teri

A Sneak Peek

Well, here we are, back from cake land, and once again firmly rooted in the reality of building a homestead.  Unfortunately, we have been rained out of our big moving day, which was supposed to be today. We will wait at the cozy town house until things dry up enough to move heavy furniture across wet ground.  While I’ve been sharing endless photos of cakes and decadent icing, we’ve actually been hard at work creating a rustic camping situation that will be comfortable enough to live with for three or four more months, or until we finish the house.

So here is a little sneak peek of our soon-to-be home!

The garden is really coming along.  I still have peppers, basil, and some okra and onions to plant, but the main push to build a sheet mulch garden is over, and now I’m enjoying planting, sowing, and watering.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brian has been shaping and building a beautiful outdoor kitchen, creating level spaces with urbanite and earth moving, and using some lovely black walnut wood that we had milled up in Oregon to create counters and cook tops.

 

This photo is a week or two old, and shelving and running water has since been added, but you can see the sink, counter space to the left, and the cookspace to the right.  The lower level will be the “pantry.”

Moving slightly east to the living room!  That orange sofa was a total college move-out day score!  Free on the side of the road for the taking.  At first I gave Brian a “what are you, crazy?” sort of look, but I have to admit that it is comfortable and so useful for chilling out under the blue roof of the future house.

The Sun Oven at work!  We will have a two burner Coleman white gas stove, a rocket stove, and this Sun Oven to cook with.  I hope for lots of sunny days, as the Sun Oven is SO cool.

Tent, sweet Tent.  Our neighbors lent us this enormous tent in which to sleep and play.  The kids have loved spending time in there with their dolls and trucks; it’s relatively tick-free, cool, and spacious.

And maybe the most important element of our camping situation: Water.  With this rain, we now have five 50 gallon barrels of water full to the tip top (and overflowing).  The barrels we purchased from Pepsi for $10 each.  They smell like Mountain Dew.  To filter, we will be using a Berkey Water Filter.

I look forward to sharing more in-depth information about each of these elements as we move to the land and get more intimate with these systems.  I know it will be a huge adjustment, but I’m really growing more and more excited to finally live on our land.

 

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Four – The Big Day

Saturday was the Big Day.  We made our lists and checked them twice, gathered our supplies, took the cake out of the fridge Friday night, and the icing out on Saturday morning.  We loaded the cake layers, lemon curd, and icing into large coolers and headed over to the wedding site.

Despite pounding rain and thunder, everyone involved in wedding preparation was in great spirits, and we busily got to work with more than one interested onlooker.  Our first task was whipping the cold icing back into warm fluffiness with our hand mixer.  I had read that this would be no problem – just give it a little beating to restore the texture.  I readied the first layer while Brian beat, until he stopped, gave me a panicked look and said, “Something is wrong!” Our gorgeous, creamy Swiss Buttercream icing was weeping liquid. Oozing, really, and it was the texture that of runny scrambled eggs.  Not good. And of course, the radiant bride walked in at that very moment to check how things were going.  Brian literally hid the bowl and muttered, “Great!” We smiled, continued beating and hoped for the best.  After a tense five minutes, the icing returned to a smooth creamy texture, thank goodness. (A more experienced baker friend told us today that we probably broke our meringue!)

The rest of the cake assembly seemed like, well, like cake!  Layer after layer of cake was edged with icing, and the center was filled with alternating layers of jam or lemon curd.

And stacked very, very high…

Our two naked cakes, ready for decoration!

After the ceremony (for which the rain stopped and the sun shone!), I gathered lemon balm, lavender, violet leaves, chamomile blossoms, and roses, which were arranged on the cake like so…

And like so…

It’s funny how this cake almost took on a life of its own. Part of that is probably my doing. I have to admit that I got a bit obsessive about making this cake.  It just seemed so important to make the most delicious, most beautiful cake we possibly could.  And, not to brag too much, but it really was one of the most delicious cakes I’ve ever tasted.  So moist, flavorful, tangy, and sweet.

The kids agreed!

As we were preparing to leave, I went into the dining room to check if I left anything behind.  There sat the remainder of the cake – just a quarter of a tier, really – calling out to me.  I found myself a Ziploc bag, cut off a small chunk, and took it home to eat for breakfast today.  Just perfect.

If you feel inspired to make your very own Lemon Wedding Cake, here are links to the recipes we used:

Lemon Cake: From Martha Stewart Weddings  We multiplied the recipe by six for enough batter for two of the following: 8, 10, 12 and 11 inch rounds. We sifted almond meal and used it in place of 1/4 of the flour called for in the recipe.

Lemon Curd: Another Martha Stewart recipe. We made seven batches and still had plenty left over.

Swiss Meringue Buttercream: Martha again!  We doubled the recipe to make 10 cups.  Read the tutorial on this site if you’re planning on trying this recipe for the first time!

Simple Syrup: We brushed this on the cake sides to keep them moist.  Bring 1 cup water and 1 cup sugar to a boil.  When the liquid cools, add 1 tsp vanilla or lemon juice.

Jam: Take your pick!  We used Blueberry, Apricot and a Blueberry-Strawberry mixture.  Divine!

 

Making a Wedding Cake: Part One – Planning

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Two – Tasting

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Three – Baking

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Three – Baking

Three batches, 16 cups of sugar, 4 dozen eggs, and 8 lbs of butter later, the cake is baked, the icing is whipped, and the curd is in the fridge!  Perhaps the highlight of the baking experience for me was the drama of the Swiss Meringue Buttercream icing. Quite frankly, making this icing was a bit daunting – so much whipping, so much butter at stake. But the oh-so-friendly and helpful world of cake blogging made everything work out just fine.

Starting out with 8 sticks of butter, cold and ready to be added to the egg whites and sugar.

First you get this lovely, marshmallow fluff consistency,

Next, you add the pats of butter, bit by bit,

Until the icing looks like scrambled eggs!

And clumpier still!  But never fear. Just keep on whipping and whipping until…

Ta da! The most perfect, smooth, creamy, buttery, lightly sweet, melt in your mouth icing you will ever experience.

If, after reading this post, you have a hankering for a Swiss Meringue Buttercream, I highly recommend this tutorial. 

Next time: We decorate and eat!

 

Making a Wedding Cake: Part One – Planning

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Two – Tasting

Making a Wedding Cake: Part Four – The Big Day