The Road to Gastric Distress is Paved with Good Intentions.

Against my better judgement, I have decided to run a cooking experiment as a blog subject. This is a poor idea for the following reasons:
1. This was decided as part of a whimsical journey to turn something "inedible" into a fancy dish I have never made before.
2. My mother follows my blog and will probably read this before I serve the "experiment" for dinner. The last thing I really need right now is for her to spread insurrection amongst the guinea pigs after reading about my extremely non-food-scientific methods.
3. I committed to this recipe under the assumption that I had all the ingredients I needed. Au. Con.trair.

This doesn't look so complicated...

Chilled cucumber soup is often prompted by an affluence of cucumbers from the garden. My first deviation is that this is not a problem I have. As a matter of fact none of the cukes I planted really thrived, and I'm only just now getting little baby cucumbers on one anemic little cucurbita (don't mistake my aversion to redundancy for horticultural expertise, I had to look that up. More on what a gardening newb I am further down.)

"Are you my mother?"

In fact my trouble is my own impatience.

I'll cop to it. I have never grown watermelon before, despite it being one of my favorite foods. After 3 months from seeds to taking over the back row of my 20x20 garden plot, I spied a melon that had grown large very quickly. The "thump" sounded right, so I gave it a shot, and sliced it open intending to serve it with dinner that night.

I was massively disappointed to discover I had de-vined the melon before it's time in my inexperience! it was totally pale green on the inside. Not exactly the sweet treat I intended for dessert. 
Bravely I gave it a taste, and found that while it wasn't sweet it DID taste a great deal like cucumber.
I had hope that this farmgirl would be able to make something of this immature melon!

No, not THAT kind of immature melon!!

THIS kind of immature melon!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So here I have brought you, gentle reader, to the forefront of my mellonic motivation!

I had massive amounts of green melon (while not a technically "large" melon in and of itself, if substituting for cucumber, it works out to a good deal of cucumber) and I had plain yogurt leftover from starting my home fermented jars and on that assumption alone I presumed I had my bases covered. Since I had a fresh lemon, dried dill, and garlic salt I figured I could get away with fudging my lack of mint, fresh dill and garlic cloves and leave salt out of the recipe.
I began with slicing and  cutting the rind off the green melon.

I didn't think it would be necessary to grate the melon as it was pretty juicy and I would be just putting it in the blender anyway.
When I peeked into the plain yogurt container it should have been nearly full, as I only bought it for starter for homemade 'gurt.
Alas. Someone had tried eating about a cup of the stuff. Thankfully I remembered that *some* cucumber soup recipes call for an extremely thick sour cream, so I fudged in a cup of sour cream to fill the rest of my yogurt measures, a necessary step as the fam polished off the entirety of yesterday's homemade.
I spotted another recipe entirely that suggested celery seed so I decided to toss some of that in as well, and my sweet basil is particularly zesty and prolific so I decided to throw in a large diced handful of it, shooting for a more savory herb mixture in the cold soup.

I stirred all the ingredients and tossed it in my leaky blender. How is it my mother owned one ugly green plastic Osterizer my entire childhood and it never cracked or burned out (despite smelling like brimstone when it ran) but I have gone through no less than 5 blenders in my 9 year marriage?






Anyway. I banked on pureeing the ingredients before they began to seep out the bottom of the blender jar and all over the counter, and succeeded. Just barely.

Looks nice.... doesn't taste bad. Lets see what the kids say?

Whatever. These little urchins think "fine dining" comes from a drive through.
They look more like my husband anyway.
I actually think it tastes quite good, just maybe not sweet and dessert-ish like I always assumed cucumber soup would be.
On the upside, if no one eats it, I can jar the stuff and freeze it for my next potluck. Some pots are always luckier than others. 

How to Goose a Duck...

Last night the house cat wandered into the incubation room (ok... laundry room), took a deep whiff of the baby bird smell and tail a' twitching had that predatory look in his eye. I decided then and there it would be in the best interests of my fledgling waterfowl to move the brooder to mine and hubster's bedroom, which worked out well since it's always 90 degrees in there anyway and nothing I can do about it.

In other words, it's really hot.

With 3 trips up and down in the night anyway to look in on them and add food/water on my way it worked out. This morning I was greeted with gentle peeping and 5 little fuzzy bills looking for more baby food. Then a screech and a wail of the actual baby expecting some baby food. Then as soon as I finished getting something for the 5 year old to eat the 10 month old was hungry too.

Kids fed, husband fed, dogs watered, garden watered, horses fed I got back to those ducks. They're really active today! Even the runty one is starting to keep up with the big girls.

Once I got the brooder clean I sat down to look at the hatchery's info and they posted my girls' breed as sold out till 2012.

So it looks like they won't be able to replace the babies I lost without a substitution, and honestly-- I dont want anything besides egg ducks, and I really don't want crested versions of the same breed-- they look like Snooki, and have a lethal gene. (If only we could say the same for Jersey Shore.)

The far less rare than you'd like-- Crested Snooki

I'm definitely going to try to pursue the refund for the remainder of my order and finish off my flock elsewhere.
One site I've been looking at is Metzer Farms. They purportedly have good gene strains for campbells, as well as hybrid layer ducks that supposedly out perform khakis laying wise, and very different personalities. I'm thinking of finishing my flock either with their campbells, or with the white layers they have.



Something I found useful on the metzer site in the field of farm girl skills, is a video that teaches you how to check the gender of your day old ducks and geese.

Yeah... it's not pretty but at least you'll know how many and which of your hatch-lings is destined for the freezer.

I guess I'd have to get some kind of bands so I could mark them...

One of the sad things about the Golden 300 Hybrid and the White Layer is that since they are bred for efficient commercial egg farms, a disproportionate number of females are in demand and the males are pretty much unwanted.

To the extent that the farms will include one free of charge male for every female ordered (or less) which is perfectly fine for us hobby farmers as we don't mind cooking smaller mallards, or passing them on to other backyard farmers (imagine what a stud duck of this breed will do for a home flock!)
If I manage to get a refund from my first hatchery, I may just have to give some white layers a try this summer.

Ducking the Odds

A few months ago I looked up from my copy of "You'll Grow Organic, and Like It!" and said to the spousal unit; "Hon, you know what?"
"Hnh?" he grunted as he glanced over from his Farkle game.
"I could totally make money off of eggs."
"Can you get me a drink of water?" he asked, finally noticing I was speaking to him.
"Chicken eggs are a dime a dozen, but I bet if I sold farm fresh duck eggs, I could really clean up."
"Duck eggs?" he replied incredulously.
"Yeah, ducks."
"Can you even eat those?"
"Course you can, they're nutritional gold, french chef's love 'em, second to none for baking--"
"How much is it going to cost?" he cut me off.
"Well, I can feed them out of the kitchen cupboard, so pretty much just the cost to buy the babies and building a shelter."
"Cool."

I started shopping around hatcheries, I had a good idea what I wanted, khaki campbells for their egg endurance, one hatchery wanted $41.00 to ship less than 10 ducklings, and my debit card collapsed in a fit of laughter. Finally I settled on Hatchery number 3 out of Texas. Their price on sexed birds (don't get excited, that only means I have a shot at hosting ladies night in the duck house, not a baby shower) was pretty reasonable, and they didn't have a prohibitive minimum purchase. They also had a pretty good reputation on the internet in terms of reviews, and a habit of tossing bonus boyos to make sure the girl'os  stayed warm enough in shipping. The final decision was based on the assumption that the journey by mail from Texas to Arizona would be less extreme on the hatchlings.

I sat on my order for a while-- anticipating a time when I would have some cash free enough to blow on my venture. Finally I had an ebay auction that ended favorably enough that I finally had some seed money in my paypal account.
The second that payment hit the account I was filling my order for 12 khaki campbell "pullets" (I was under the impression that 'pullet' only applied to chickens, but eh-- I'm hardly expert enough to quibble.)
By this point I had already waited 3 months from inception to purchase date, so I'm sure that the gentle reader can understand how flabbergasted this farmwife was to discover that the next available hatch date was yet ANOTHER month away.
*sigh*.

Finally the delivery day arrived. As I was roused from a sound saturday sleep on a holiday weekend by the postal clerk at the crack of 6 am, ("we have ducklings for you. Come get them at the back door of the post office") I leaped up with the excitement of a kid at Christmas.


Farm animals though they may be, I love new creatures coming into the family.
I inspected the box and was saddened to discover that of 12 ducklings, only 8 survived the trip, and even worse 3 more perished throughout the day. They also did not send any freebies.
At the moment I have 5 brave soldiers still standing in the brooder, with prayers that they all make it with the help of my attentive care.

Hopefully tuesday the hatchery will get ahold of me and we can discuss making good on my order (they do promise a live delivery guarantee after all.) If my rate of survival is somewhere south of 50%... Im not sure I want them to put more of them in the mail... and I definitely dont want to have to wait for another hatch in a month.

I've been looking for a closer hatchery in the future. Not because the hatchery I chose does bad business, but I can't stand the thought of such sweet babies dying on such a long, hot trip. Got a favorite hatchery? drop a comment! If I get a refund from hatchery number 3 I'll be looking to pick up another 7 hen-ducklings to round out my dozen.