Election day

Today's the day, the day we choose our future president, or the day that our future ends. That sounds so like, dark haha.
I just woke up and already I can tell that it's going to be a super long day. I am super annoyed at everything, and I am exhausted. I apparently really need to start going to bed earlier.
On a positive note. After months of bitching and lecturing one of my beat friends on the importance of voting, she has finally decided to vote! Yay! I am so proud of her. Though I think that she isn't nearly as excited to vote as I was when I was old enough to vote for Obama the first time. But then I did tell her that she had to be up and ready to go by eight fifteen. We aren't really morning people.
Then from voting I have to go to school and then to go and get my new drivers license or not to go and get my new drivers license. Decisions decisions. Hmmm. Well maybe for once I should do the responsible thi g and get it. Plus they close by four! So that means that I just have to survive the next ten hours!

Ciao xo

America the beautiful.

So what is it that makes America beautiful? And no I'm not talking about America Ferrera but instead this wonderful country we all call home. Is it that we are a democratic state where the people elect our officials? *cough cough* vote Obama *cough cough*. Is it that we are a country of religious freedoms and a separation of church and state? What is it that makes America a great country? It's none of those.
Hello deep fat Friday! That's right. We are an amazing country because we have created a culture that thrives on the necessity of having readily available fast food, i.e. fried foods. It's astounding the number of people who eat fried foods on a daily basis, and it continues to disgust me how often I wind up eating something that has been fried and a vat of fat. Haha vat of fat. I made a rhyme.
Well to continue with our education at school we did a day (deep fat Friday) where we learned all about the process of deep-fat frying by frying farm raised catfish, homemade onion rings, and just about anything that you can imagine. We even did a whole box of twinkies. That's ten twinkies!!!! I am pretty sure that I took off about five years of my life with all the artery clogging fat that I ingested. Enjoy the pictures.

Ciao xo

Oh and if you are wondering I tried to create the look of some deep sea monster with my plated catfish and onion rings haha.

Trying to catch up

So time just seems to escape me completely. Maybe it's just part of my habit to start another project and then stop in the middle and forget. But. I just an iPhone and have downloaded the blogger app so be prepared for a buttload of posts. Ready? Go!

And a picture of my girls for you all.

Ciao xo

Culinary Techniques

So I thought that since my blog is all about my journey to being greener and more organic as well as my journey to becoming a chef, I would start to share with you all our daily recipes and techniques that we are learning in class. Today's recipe was for Beef Stroganoff. I don't have a copy of the recipe on me at the moment as I am now blogging from my new iPhone as I feel like I will actually be able to continue posting to you all while at work and on the constant go. The wonders of today's technology. So the recipe will come soon. But here are some pictures of the dish. Oh and it was Delicious with a capital d.

Ciao xo

Busy few weeks

I have to say that it has been quite an eventful few weeks. I am sorry for not writing lately, but with everything going on there really hasn't been a whole lot of time to come and write for you all. But I promise to be better about that.
   So as I said the last few weeks have been quite eventful. I started my lab classes at school where we are actually working in the kitchen cooking and fabricating things. Right now I am attending the Kitchen Essentials class, and I don't think that I will ever look at another potato the same way. We have sliced so many potatoes in learning the many different cuts that we are required to know, and eaten so many recipes that are centered around potatoes that I think I could turn into a giant potato. But I have learned some very amazing new recipes and ideas for my restaurant along the way. For example today we made two different kinds of soup. First we made a potato soup which was pretty simple. It was basically just red potatoes that had been medium diced boiled in chicken stock with crisped bacon, and sauteed celery and onions and then we simply added roux which is just a simple sauce made of butter and flower, then two gallons of milk (it was a rather large batch of about three gallons) and cooked till the potatoes were tender. In the end after a bit of seasoning it tasted like clam chowder minus the clams.
   Next we made an Indian soup. It was diced carrots and onions that we boiled down with chicken stock till tender, then we pureed it down to a soup and added seasonings including curry, cayenne, (I added sugar as it made a huge difference) and some salt. Then finally we added half a quart of heavy cream. And voila. Such an awesome recipe and was my favorite of the two.
  We also had our Tour de Coop here in Cedar Rapids last Saturday and Sunday. We had dismal weather, but it managed to stop raining for the duration of the tour, and we actually had a great turnout of about 30 visitors per coop! I don't think I have ever had such fun talking about chickens with complete strangers. There were all types of people from every walk of life who came out for the tour. We had families who came with their kids, 4-H teens and their parents, other local backyard chicken raisers, prospective chickens keepers, and they all just seemed like such nice people.
  Oh and I also went through a minor tragedy in the family. We lost three of our chickens. Two of them we lost to a dog who killed them, and the other we think died of old age/stress because she kind of just flopped over. But I am now back to full capacity as I wasn't going to just show my single chicken I had left, and I got several new girls from another local chicken raiser who was looking to thin out her flock. And I am as happy as a clam! They are a great bunch of girls with such personalities, and all the eggs I get every day! I get up to about five eggs a day on average, and my new favorite chicken is named Blanche after the golden girls ( I have three named after them and am just missing a Sophia). She is a little white leghorn with a HUGE and i mean huge comb and attitude, and for such a little bird she lays the biggest white eggs! They are like twice the size of jumbo store eggs. It's awesome.
So yes thats pretty much how things have been going for us lately.
Ciao xo

Inspiration

  So as you may have noticed, I haven't posted much in the last week. Well lets just say that shit really hit the fan in my house over the last week and a half. But I have learned from everything I have experienced over the last week, and am inspired to be even more self-sustaining over the next several years.
  Looking back on everything it seems that aside from the tragedy that struck my chicken coop yesterday (which I will talk about in another post), the worst and most influencing thing that happened to me and my partner was the local gas company disconnecting our gas. Yep, they came out several days ago and shut us off. And of course with the luck we had been having, within twenty-four hours of our gas being shut off, the temperature plummeted here in Iowa and the inside temperature of my house this morning was 45 degrees F. Well we fought with the company for several days, and finally in the end my sister-in-law was good enough to help us get it turned back on so we could have heat and hot water. Oh yeah I haven't had a shower in four days, gross right?
  I take personal responsibility for the fact that we paid the bill late due to our busy schedules, but I don't think that it was even remotely humane of them to shut our gas off when the weather forecast had predicted such cold weather. Well I won't lie, I am filing a formal complain to the board of utilities here in Iowa, but this experience has made me even more determined to become more and more self-sustained. So now I am planning on looking into getting solar panels that I can then tie into our heating system so that we can eventually just do completely away with using gas all together. Of course that won't be able to be achieved right away as, well if this hasn't taught me that I am financially poor, we will have to buy one at a time due to the high cost. But in the end we will be able to live a greener, more sustainable life. I think all in all its a win.

Ciao xo

 

That time of year...

It is officially October! October is a very special month to me for a myriad of reasons. First I was born on October 9th, so first reason, its my birthday month. Second reason is the season. I know technically its autumn, but there is just always something specific about October that, to me anyways, makes it feel like October has its own special season. Next there is Halloween, All Hallows, All Hallows Eve, Samhain; only the most spiritually influencing holiday of the year. I think aside from one's birthday and Christmas, eveyones favored holiday should be Halloween. Who doesn't love to dress up in a costume? So with all of these amazing aspects to October, I have dubbed it my time of the year.
   The leaves are changing in full bloom now with color coming from each and every direction. Each tree seems as if its a star changing from one phase of its life to the next as their colors go from green to yellows and golds, deep reds and burgundies. All these leaves have me thinking two things. I really need to buy a rake! And its time for scarecrows! Every year we take leaves and make our own homemade scarecrows which hang out on our front porch to scare trick-or-treaters on Halloween. I remember growing up instead of stuffing some old clothes to make scarecrows, my friends and I would rake up enough leaves for a big enough pile to hide all three of us in at the bottom of my driveway. When a car would come barreling down the street BAM! We would jump out of the leaves with a rake just as the car was passing my driveway to scare the crap out of the driver. Lets just say we got into some trouble when one of the cars careened into a telephone pole...
   Fall harvests. Its that time of year, the time to collect your last harvests of the season (unless you have either a cold box or a hoop house of course ^.-), and to clear out the garden patches for the spring plantings. Well my goal is to become as self-sustainable as I can be. So we have decided that we are turning the very back of our yard into our own little farm. We have mapped it out and planned out all the seeds to be planted in the spring. There will be five beds, and I am finished with three so far. It's a lot of work digging up all that dirt and removing the turf AND THEN tilling the soil! Just for the three beds it took me two days to do. (I will have to go out and take pictures when they are all done so you can see the plan) We plan to go to the local composting center and get a bunch of free compost to mix in with the soil so that in the spring we just have to loosen up the earth before we can start planting. I am so excited for next years harvest! I think the chickens even like the garden beds because they helped us dig it up the whole time while they searched for bugs and ate any grubs they came across. They are adorable when they help me in the garden!
   Now my favorite (and yes I have may favorites but this is really the biggest thing) thing about this time of year, is the cooking that goes on. Pumpkins! They are all ready to either be harvested or have already been harvested and are ready to be carved for Halloween and cooking! Pumpkin pies, pumpkin muffins, pumpkin breads, pumpkin soup, pumpkin ice cream. The list goes on and on of the many wonderful things that you can make with a pumpkin. So many that I can't keep up, and pumpkin is utterly one of the most amazing fruits. And yes. I call it a fruit. Not a vegetable.
   So even on a rainy day like today, I can't help but absolutely love October and this time of year.

Ciao xo