dab-dish cooking

I am not obsessive about too many things in life, which is why my house looks the way it does and my children are frequently wandering around wearing mismatched socks.

But using up food leftovers? I'm a fanatic. Maybe it's because we produce some of our food ourselves, and know how much work is involved. Or maybe it's because I am really cheap. Or enjoy a good challenge. Take your pick. They probably all apply.

I was leafing through my newly-acquired collection of Workbasket magazines, and came across an article by Mariana Prieto from the March 1951 edition, called "Dab Dishes":

   Have you ever gone to the ice box and found it crowded with saucers of left-overs? There will be a dab of this and a smidgen of that, not enough for a complete serving for all the family, yet too much to throw away. Then that's the time to make what I call a "dab-dish."

   With the high cost of food, I've found that these dishes cut my grocery bill considerably as well as delighting my family as new taste treats. There are limitless food combinations that you can make so that your own imagination and creativeness can help you in mixing these dab-dishes.

Dab cooking! There's actually a name for it! I doubt that my family has always been delighted with my "new taste treats" but they are usually pretty good about shoveling it down. Mostly because they have little choice in the matter.

(As an aside: I love that all her left-overs are on saucers, in a time before Tupperware.)

This past week, I had a ton of left-overs gifted by my mother-in-law after a Mother's Day meal at her house.

• Monday, the steak was cut into strips and made into fajitas in the crock pot, along with sliced onions, green peppers, a packet of taco seasoning (because I didn't have fajita seasoning on hand) and a can of diced tomatoes with jalapenos. Note: saute the onions and peppers in a little olive oil BEFORE adding to the crock pot to get the proper texture.


• Tuesday, the french bread became croutons for our salad. This is a great use of left-over bread, second only to garlic bread. Cube it, toss in olive oil mixed with a little salt and italian herbs, and broil until toasty.


• Wednesday, the broccoli and potatoes went into a chicken casserole with cream-of-mushroom-soup and cheese sauce. My family draws the line at reheated leftover veggies. The only way to get them down is to mix them into a casserole.

Do you cook with dabs of this and that? If so, what is your favorite dab dish creation? I am always on the hunt for new ideas.

bound up

Trimming hooves and weighing lambs and moving sheep wasn't the end of my work Saturday. I scrubbed water tanks, rolled and stored the temporary fence netting, cleaned out the barn. I was on fire. While I was still in my dirty work clothes, I decided that it was way past time to wash the sheep coats vacated on shearing day only two months ago. I am so timely. But washing is a bit of a chore, so I tend to put it off.

I am very lucky to have a dedicated washing machine in the basement for sheep-related items. It was our old top loader, that didn't give up the ghost but makes a heck of a racket when it is agitating. Imagine a donkey in labor. It can handle a few washloads per year, and it does a swell job of spinning water out of rinsed fleece and yarn, so I am most grateful for its assistance.

The one drawback: it isn't hooked up to a water supply, so washing requires filling the drum by hand. Bit by bit I fill it up, then it agitates in its noisy fashion while I stand guard to make sure the filthy spin cycle water is properly deposited in the sink. Lather and repeat for the rinse cycle.

On Saturday, after I had done two loads of sheep coats, I put a load of jeans in the regular washing machine and went off to do other non-sheepy things, finally. (If memory serves, I took a nap.) It was a bit of a surprise when Secondo discovered a flooded laundry area a few hours later.

Like many basement laundry set-ups, our utility sink (to the right in the picture above) drains into a dedicated box, which houses the laundry pump. This pump faithfully directs the dirty water up a pipe and into the septic system. When the pump fails to work, however, you have a flood.

All laundry was temporarily suspended.

Due to the demands of Mother's Day, my husband couldn't address the problem until later in the week. When he got the pump outside for a closer look, he was most annoyed to discover that the problem was...

Wool. Hundreds of fibers, wrapped around the pump's main assembly, preventing proper functioning. He spent an hour or so picking out the pieces with needlenose pliers.

I was already in the doghouse, when all the cuts on his hands (from trying to get into the assembly) started to get infected.

I have mowed the front lawn as penance. I think I will be sending the remaining fleeces out to a mill to be washed.

wising up

We are fast approaching our 10 year anniversary of owning sheep, which is hard to believe. We kind of fell backwards into the whole shepherding gig; we certainly did not say at any point "it has been a lifelong desire to own livestock, so let's move to a rural area and immerse ourselves in the farming life," humming the theme song to Green Acres all the while.

Sheep just happened, mostly due to the way farm property is taxed in NJ, and now we have a whole lifestyle (and I have a whole business) built around sheep. Cue blog post from two weeks ago. Life takes you down strange but interesting sideroads sometimes.

It still amazes me, though, how much I have to learn. We are constantly working out new—and hopefully better—ways of working with the sheep. Lessons are learned the hard way sometimes. And sometimes you can't believe it took you 10 years to figure something out.

This past weekend, the ewes-and-lambs group had been put into the barn late Friday night to shelter from the predicted storms. It did indeed storm, and I was most grateful that I was able to sleep soundly knowing that they were protected. The next morning, I went out to feed and move them to a different pasture, and I remembered that Lambykins' coat had become too small, and needed changing.

One of the key lessons, which unfortunately took us way too long to learn, is that if you already have the sheep caught, most of the work is done. Make sure to get everything taken care of at that point.

I started to change her coat... then I decided that it was time to get coats back onto everyone else... then I checked her hooves and saw they needed trimming... and we were off to the races, or should I say the workhouse.

The difficulty of hoof trimming by yourself is that the animal dances away when you try to get the back hooves up, especially if you don't have a solid fence panel to pin the back end up against. A person to hold the head immobile is a key component. I was by myself, and bemoaning my lack of squeeze chute, when my eyes fell upon a spare Sydell panel (from our truck pen) propped against the wall, and a little lightbulb went on.

By tying the panel to the hay rack and the barn wall, I was able to solve two problems at once: I had a little pen to drive the sheep into for easy catching, and once haltered, I could tie them to the hay rack for maximum control. They went into the little chute created by the panel and hay rack willingly, because they could see out the other side; the binder twine was invisible to them. Sheep won't go into a blind alley, but they will go into a narrow space if they think they can squeeze out the other end.

Once tied up, it was a simple matter for me to attend to each hoof with them having little say in the matter.

About halfway through the process, my husband sent out reinforcements. Once he was there, I decided to go one step further and weigh all the lambs. Too bad I don't have any pictures of that process, accomplished with a pulley system over a barn beam, which you can see in the background behind him, that we put into place last year. Last year! How did it take us so long to figure that one out?

I am also regretful that I didn't manage a shot of him with the grain bucket, running like heck towards the far back pasture once we were done, with eight ewes and fourteen lambs in hot pursuit. The power of the grain bucket was one of the lessons we learned early on.

defloofified

Yeah, I made that word up.

But it is an accurate description of what happens when you take a dog that looks like this:

And end up with one that looks like this after a trip to the groomers, which he HATES:

The epitome of a hang-dog look. I think it may be that ribbon they insist on attaching to his collar. From herding sheep this morning onto a bit of fresh pasture (hence his soaked fur, it was a very heavy dew on overgrown grass)... to a silly little ribbon. It is beneath his dignity.

He was thrilled to be back at work tonight, in the dark, helping to move the sheep back into the barn before the thunderstorm hit. I cannot sleep if a thunderstorm strikes at night, and they are out without solid shelter. I made everyone come out and help me. I think he may have been the only one happy to do so, but not quite as happy as he was when we took the ribbon off.

can't wait

(The first part of this post was written on Saturday morning on my iPhone, but I couldn't figure out how to add pictures to the post and I had to throw in the towel after an hour so I could get ready to go to the fairgrounds. I added pictures and the rest of the weekend tonight.) 

Though perhaps a more accurate title would be can't sleep but can't wake up everyone in the hotel room just yet.

The younger two boys and I drove down to Maryland yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately Primo is a junior now, and caught up with things like SATs, so he has to miss the festival for the first time in many years.

Someone had no trouble sleeping on the way down. He was lucky to have a little corner of the car to sleep in, we were so jam-packed.

The first order of business was to enter his fleece from Lambykins, which he had very carefully skirted a few weeks ago, into the fleece show and sale. He was entering it as a 4-H fleece, so he had to do it himself.

Of course everyone made a big deal about him so it was all good.

I have to leave early this morning to set up the rest of the booth. The tent was not as expected, and so we had to reconfigure the entire layout. We were in good shape by the time I left last night. Now back to the fairgrounds, and hopefully have a busy day selling!

Now for the rest of the weekend:

We were blessed with simply beautiful weather. Lucky break, as our tent was smaller than the size we paid for and so we spilled out a bit on the sides. In the end the revised booth layout worked really well, and it was filled with tons of beautiful items to sell.

And sell and sell and sell we did. This is all I had left of over 200 cat toys at the end of the weekend, and they were only a small part of the booth!

As with every year, I couldn't have managed without a fantastic support team.

My dad, Secondo and Terzo

Unfortunately I failed to get a photo of the most valuable member, my mom. She is in the background of that photo, to the right, in the hat. Just like her presence all weekend, in the background propping my venture up. I don't know how I would have managed without her.

And Lambykins fleece? It didn't win, but it did sell. However Terzo is unhappy with my edict that the money has to go into the bank instead of into Legos.

house of wool

Yesterday, on his way in the front door, Terzo commented on the decorations.

"I like our new flag. It's perfect."

It took me a minute to realize that our new flag was in fact dyed wool yarn on a hanger, up where one would usually hang a plant, to take advantage of yesterday's breeze. It goes perfectly with the farm boot decor.

In fact, the yarn was from wool produced by our sheep, millspun and then dyed by me. Given that our dining room currently looks like this (maybe a little better at the moment, I have been very busy pricing and packing things away today):

And our front yard is currently hosting this crew, much to the amusement and/or amazement of everyone who drives by:

Is it any wonder the kid thinks that is an accurate representation of what goes on around here, freak flag though it may be?

I hung another flag this morning in celebration of our status.

woolly fuzz

I have been kicking it non-stop getting ready for the Maryland Sheep & Wool Festival this coming weekend. I did start a little bit of prep in March, but I also had two huge deadlines for other projects that had to be met. I also find it hard to do some of the required tasks in small doses. So much has to be pulled out, so many things prepared in various stages, that it only really works as a full-time, around-the-clock venture.

Remember Jenny's beautiful curly fleece, that she wrecked last year? This year, I won: the coat stayed on. It is gorgeous and I have been washing the locks in small batches. Some have been put aside to be sold in their natural color, but not all of the fleece was pearly white, and those portions were dyed.

Isn't it interesting how the dye took up differently along the locks? I think it had to do with the fleece's exposure to the elements. She didn't have the coat on all summer and that part of the fleece has a different texture.

I have been very busy dyeing regular roving as well. Weighing and packaging it is always the part of the operation that I fail to allot sufficient time for, and once again I am left scrambling at the last minute to get it all done. I took a hit today when my right-hand helper, the sun, failed to make an appearance. Mighty hard to dry all these things in a timely manner without its help, and I spent today jerry-rigging poor substitutes.

My body is starting to protest against the pace. In addition to all the bits of wool that are attached to my body and trailing around on the floor, I am feeling like they are stuffed into my head as well. I was in this state when the office manager came into the house this afternoon—I was in my usual haunt these days, the basement—to announce that lambs were in the office parking lot.

The ewe and lamb group had been moved onto the rich grass on the other side of the house on Saturday afternoon. They weren't super happy with the damp drizzly conditions today, and I was planning to move them when Secondo got home from school at 3 pm, but evidently they decided around 2:30 pm to take matters into their own hooves. It wasn't just a few lambs. It was the entire flock.

I managed to get them out of the parking lot and into the small paddock. I put the gate back onto its hinges, sort of, while they tried to push their way back out again. My last view of them was grazing the non-existent grass, in the rain. Sheep logic.