Setting on Duck Eggs

     Since the sad demise of one of our hen ducks I decided to stop collecting duck eggs. I let our remaining hen duck collect a clutch of eggs to see if we could hatch out some baby ducks. She had collected about 9 eggs as of yesterday morning, then decided she had enough to start sitting. Duck eggs require 28 days to incubate. That means the baby ducks will be due to hatch out close to my birthday, April 14. Our previous ducks, fawn and white India Runner ducks, were too nervous to successfully hatch out ducklings. They were just like Jemima Puddle Duck in the Beatrice Potter story. Long on ambition, but short on perseverance. I tried to hatch some duck eggs in an incubator only to discover that our previous drake was also a slacker so none of the eggs were fertilized. I'm hoping this hen duck will be successful.

A clutch of nine duck eggs

Mon Cherie Canard starting to set on her eggs

      I was fortunate to be home while a crew was cutting down limbs and trees to clear the area near the power lines. They were very happy when I offered them a place to dump the chipped branches.  Now I am the proud owner of a big pile of chips that I can use on pathways and to put fresh mulch on the area in front of my bee hives.  It also made a good little mountain for my grandson to climb. 

My grandson John Wesley Tunnell on top of my pile of bark mulch

Sunday Sick Day

    I was informed by my sweetie that I would not be going to church today. She apparently thinks my sense of duty might overcome my desire to not be a Typhoid Mary and spread my cold to the rest of ward. I'm pretty sure I would have stayed home on my own but her edict certainly made the decision easier on my conscience. I'm enjoying a rather leisurely Sunday. I did still have to go outside and take care of the goats and the poultry. I spent some time on lds.org. I read an interesting article by Elder Uchtdorf about the Dead Sea Scrolls and listened to some chapters from the Book of Mormon while I spun some wool. I was interested to learn that there are about a dozen names used in the Book of Mormon that aren't found in the Bible but somehow turned up in the Dead Sea Scrolls. Included in the list are the names Sariah, Hagoth, Alma, Muloki, and Ammonihah.

    I had originally planned to bake bread on Monday, but since I will be home all day I've decided to do it today.  I took the dough out of the fridge at about 10 a.m., then formed it into loaves at about noon. I divided the dough into two loaves. One loaf (about 1/3 of the dough) I made into the standard "batard" while I used a banneton to help shape the other loaf into a "boule". The batard is the standard torpedo shaped loaf while the boule is a circular loaf.  I received the banneton, a reed proofing basket, as a birthday gift from my daughter Rachel.  I was really tickled to get the banneton but I'm a bit embarrassed to admit that it's been almost a year and I'm just now using it for the first time.

The dough at noon after a two hour rise

     After the two hour rise, the dough has to be shaped, then allowed to "proof" for another two hours in its final shape.  The use of the banneton or proofing basket allows the boule loaf to develop a little more height.

My banneton, oiled, floured, and ready to use

    My boule loaf came out of the banneton without mishap. Since it was the first time I had used it I was concerned it might stick to the basket in some place. I used a razor blade to put the cuts in the tops of the loaves. The cuts are decorative, but also allow the loaves to rise better. The oven was already preheated to 550 degrees fahrenheit so into the oven they went. I was so excited to get them into the oven that I neglected to take a photo of proofed and cut loaves. The below photo of the loaves newly placed in the oven will have to suffice.

Boule loaf almost finished proofing

Proofed batard loaf

Proofed and cut loaves just placed in the oven. Note the decorative swirls on the boule

Voila! Home baked sour dough bread

    The bread turned out well. I think I need to make my cuts a bit longer. The batard loaf started to blow out on one side.  The boule loaf had a small blowout on one end that caused it to resemble a turtle starting to poke his head out of his shell.  Longer cuts on the top of the loaf would allow the bread to rise in the oven better without trying to escape to one side or the other. I was dying to cut into one, but the book said they need to cool for an hour before cutting. Bishop Nielson told me once that serving bread hot is a way to compensate for poor quality bread as it all tastes good hot from the oven. At Linda's suggestion I did butter the crust while the bread was still hot.

The crust is a bit dark but the interior is perfect

    Today represents such a stark contrast to last Sunday.  A week ago I arose at 6:00 a.m. in order to have time to feed the animals and get ready for a 7:30 a.m. bishopric meeting. That meeting ended at about 9:30 a.m. giving me an hour and a half break before Sacrament Meeting at 11:00 a.m. I spent part of that break on the computer at the bee store indexing. I conducted Sacrament Meeting due to Brother Sessions being out of town, then taught a family history lesson in a youth Sunday School class. Our normal three hour block of Sunday meetings ended at 2:00 p.m.  I stayed at the church to wait for the deacons to return from collecting Fast Offerings, then counted tithing with the ward financial clerk, Brother Fabela. After dropping off the tithing deposit at the bank I just had time to get back to the church for 4:30 p.m. choir practice.  I got home at about 6:00 p.m., ate dinner, then went to Bishop Nielson's house at 7:30 p.m. to practice a musical number the bishopric was supposed to perform today in church.  I'm not complaining about the time I spend in church service. I really enjoy my Sundays, as busy as they are. However, choir practice is my favorite part of Sunday. I feel the spirit singing the hymns of Zion more than anything else I do on Sunday. I'm grateful that our current choir director is pretty hard core in that we have choir practice almost every Sunday. While I enjoyed my Sunday of leisure today, I really missed going to church.

The Sad Fate of Sidonie Canard

    I have been home with a cold for the past three days and now it looks like I will miss church tomorrow as well. I am so grateful for Quentin in that I can just stay home and be sick. We've taken in about 50 package bee orders during the three days I have been home sleeping my cold away. After the first day or so of serious cold as I started to feel a little better, I have taken advantage of the enforced indolence to watch a few more Rootstech videos. I really enjoyed one about getting the most from Ancestry.com. The speaker was telling the story of her nephews' first visit to a cemetery near her home where they have ancestors buried. The youngest child's reaction was "We're sure related to a lot of dead people." That is a serious understatement. Hopefully I will be back in the saddle by Monday evening when I am scheduled to teach yet another beginning beekeeping class.

    I am in the process of making another batch of sour dough bread.  It doesn't take all that much time to prepare the dough, but I do have to plan ahead so that the bread is ready to bake on a day when I will have about a five hour block of time at home. On one hand Peter Reinhart's instructions are a bit complicated for me to remember without referring back to his book. On the other hand the results were so wonderful and the actual time required to do the various steps is pretty minimal. I plan to buy the book eventually. In the meantime I can just keep renewing the book as it comes due. It's not like my recipe for sour dough pancakes or waffles, or my biscuit recipe. Those recipes were pretty easy to commit to memory. The sour dough bread recipe would take half a dozen note cards for all of the instructions.

    We had a very sad experience with our ducks last night.  I had let them out earlier in the day, then fell asleep on the couch upstairs and forgot about the ducks being out.  I woke up at about three in the morning with a need to drink another dose of Niquil in order to breath and fall back asleep. As I was stumbling to the kitchen I heard the ducks quacking and remembered that I had forgot to herd them back into their pen. The quacking wasn't their usual contented, all is right with the world kind of a quack, but a very frantic quacking.  By the time I got outside I had just two ducks and one little pile of feathers.  One female escaped unharmed but I noticed a bit of blood on the drake this morning. I'm assuming he had a close encounter with a coyote so he is very lucky to be alive.  I imagined Jean Luc Canard quacking with a French accent dismissing his own wound as merely a flesh wound as he mourned the loss of his lovely Sidonie Canard.

    I'm sure there is a significant moral here for teenagers who want to stay out late.  My ducks love to spend time outside the pen and were probably quite happy I had neglected to put them back in the pen. While the pen represents a significant restriction on their freedom, it also represents safety. Teenagers have their own kind of "coyotes" who mean them harm and are also somewhat nocturnal. Generally speaking, nothing good happens when teenagers are out late at night.

Rootstech Online

    This past week I have been watching some of the Rootstech videos online.  Rootstech is a big family history conference that is sponsored by Family Search, a family history company owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (also known as Mormons). My wife and my daughter Sarah drove down to Salt Lake City and attended the conference in person. While I couldn't make the trip to Salt Lake (the bee store is very busy this time of year), I'm very grateful that a lot of the sessions are available on the internet.  I watched one yesterday on my nominal Monday off. The particular session I watched appeared to be the opening session. It lasted 90 minutes and included a number of different speakers. The one I enjoyed the most was the concluding speaker, Ree Drummond, well known for her blog, Confessions of a Pioneeer Woman.

      Drummond started out in 2006 blogging about everyday life on their Oklahoma cattle ranch.  At one point she started doing recipes in her blog which resulted in a popular televised cooking show and a cookbook.   I have only watched her show one time but I could tell right away that she was a cook after my own heart.  She was preparing a large meal to take out to a crew on the ranch that was doing some fairly demanding physical labor involving calves. They had started work very early in the day and were going to be very hungry by the time dinner showed up at the work site. The emphasis in her cooking was on flavor and hearty.  The recipes she used would never make it into a weight watcher's cookbook.  

      Drummond became interested in family history when she got married. She was a city girl who ended up marrying an Oklahoma rancher.  She thought the little town of about 35,000 she grew up in was too small for her. Now she lives out in the country and  the nearest town is about 3,000. Shortly before her marriage her soon to be in-laws presented her with a book about the Drummond family.  She immersed herself in the book and was hooked on family history. She wanted to make her own contribution to recording their family history and started a blog about the everyday life of her family on the ranch. She didn't foresee a television show or a popular cookbook, Drummond is very content with her family and life on their ranch.  While she has enjoyed doing the tv cooking show and all that went with it, she feels the most important thing she did is her blog. She described that as a journal of their family.

    As both a blogger and a family history buff I was inspired by Drummond's presentation. She blogs about their every day life, which includes lots of photos of their children, their dogs, cattle, as well as the things they eat. I felt somewhat validated in that I also like to blog about our animals and I also include recipes in my bog. Food is an important part of our family history. I enjoy that aspect of family history research. I want to know who they were, where they lived, what they did for a living, and even what they ate.  Knowing details of how somebody lived helps me feel more of a connection to their lives.

    Food is an interesting aspect of culture in that it seems to be very persistent.  Long after German immigrant families have lost all knowledge of the German language some of the food culture remains. Linda's family is a very good example of that. Her maternal grandfather was German, consequently sausage and sauerkraut are comfort foods for her.  I can also find similar examples in my own family. Growing up, I thought my mother just didn't know how to make good pancakes. I like a good fluffy pancake and mom's pancakes were always more like crepes. I later learned that she made pancakes that way on purpose because that is how my dad liked his pancakes. That was the way his mom made pancakes. Now I'm wondering if the preference for crepe-like pancakes doesn't stem from my dad's French ancestry.  Linda's closest German speaking ancestor is about four generations back. My closest French speaking ancestor is about ten generations back.

Making Borsch

    I've had a desire to make borsch for the last week or so.  It is one of my favorite soups. I'm not a big fan of either cooked beets or cooked cabbage. I generally prefer my beets pickled and my cabbage in cole slaw or made into sauerkraut.   For some reason I love them when they are combined into borsch. I first tried borsch at a class picnic when I was studying Russian at the Presidio of Monterey in 1975.  Our instructors, all native born Russians, made borsch and piroshkys, certainly not your normal American picnic fare.  It was love at first taste.  I've been a borsch fan ever since.

     Many years later, after the fall of communism, I made two trips to Russia as an FBI Special Agent. The purpose of the trips was to conduct training for the Russian state police, known as the MVD. Those initials stand for Ministry of Internal Affairs, but that is not very descriptive for most Americans.  The MVD is actually the equivalent of all of the local, state, and federal police agencies rolled into one mammoth bureaucracy.  One trip was to Krasnodar, located in the southern portion of Russian near the Black Sea.  The second trip was to Volgograd, formerly known as Stalingrad.  Both trips involved entering and leaving Russia through Moscow, checking in with the U.S. Embassy, then flying on a Russian airline to our ultimate destination.  Those trips gave me a great opportunity to experience a much broader sampling of Russian cuisine.  I enjoyed the food so much that I made a point of visiting a bookstore in Moscow to purchase a few cookbooks. I even found one written in English.

    I looked through my Russian cookbook, cleverly named "Russian Cooking", to see what it had to offer in the way of borsch recipes. It had two options, Simple Borsch and Summer Borsch with Beet Tops.  Since I didn't have beet tops available (It is officially winter after all) I chose the Simple Borsch recipe.  I didn't follow the recipe exactly (I often don't follow recipes closely). First of all, I didn't want to make a second trip to the grocery store to pick up the additional ingredients. Secondly, Russians don't always make their borsch exactly the same. It tends to vary somewhat depending on the availability of different ingredients.  Beets and cabbage are probably the only ingredients necessary to qualify the soup as borsch and the recipe offers sauerkraut as an acceptable substitute for fresh cabbage. The recipe I used is as follows:

         Simple Borsch

Ingredients:
2-3 beets
9 ounces of shredded white cabbage or sauerkraut ( I used red cabbage)
1 parsley root (I omitted this)
1 onion
1 Tbsp of tomato puree or three tomatoes
2 carrots (I omitted this)
2 Tbsp lard (I omitted this)
1/2 cup sour cream
1 Tbsp vinegar
1 Tbsp sugar
2 cloves garlic
parsley, dill, and salt to taste ( I only used the salt but I did use some pepper as well)
2 liters of meat stock ( I just used some chicken bouillon cubes)
1 Tbsp wheat flour and
1 Tbsp butter for a roux ( I omitted both the wheat and the butter)

 Directions:
     Chop the cabbage and add it to the stock previously strained and brought to a boil. Saute the beets and cut them into thin strips, along with the rest of the vegetables. Add the sautéed vegetables, along with the tomato puree, sugar, and vinegar to the stock and simmer until cooked. Mix the garlic with the large and add to the stock 5-7 minutes before the end. When the borsch is nearly done, thicken the stock with the roux.  Serve with sour cream and herbs.

I love the color of borsch

Borsch is usually served with a big dollop of sour cream

   In spite of all of my omissions my borsch turned out very well. Like many soups, the recipe is very forgiving. I love the color. Borsch is actually quite pretty as soup go. I thought it tasted as good as any borsch I had eaten in Russia or in a restaurant in the U.S.  It didn't seem to miss the lard, the parsley root, carrots, or the thickening roux. It even passed the ultimate test. Linda liked it.

Sour Dough Nirvana

    A few years back I read a book entitled 52 Loaves. Its the story of the author's voyage of discovery to learn how to make good sour dough bread.  I found the book to be a pretty good read, especially for a "How To" book. The most important thing I took from the book was the author's instruction on how to capture a wild yeast culture to make a home grown sour dough starter. I successfully did that using two apples from our little orchard. I made a few attempts to make sour dough bread which were less than fully successful. My first efforts didn't turn out terrible, but it was obvious that I had some skills I still needed to learn. That wasn't really the author's fault as I got busy with other things and wasn't able to devote the time to learning all the skills that the task required.  I have kept my sour dough starter alive over the past two years. I've mainly used it to make sour dough pancakes and waffles, which in my opinion is a pretty good use for a sour dough starter..

     I never lost the desire to learn to make good sour dough bread. That continued to percolate under the surface of my busy life.  It bubbled back to the surface recently when I checked out another bread book from the library.  The book in question, Artisan Breads Every Day by Peter Reinhart, uses the concept of refrigerating the dough to allow better gluten development. The propagation of the yeast is slowed by refrigeration while the gluten keeps on developing.  I tried this out this past weekend and was amazed at the results. My first effort resulted in a satisfactory product.  I don't mean to damn with faint praise by using the term satisfactory. I was not merely satisfied. I was very happy with the results.

    I prepared the dough on Friday, let it rise, and then put it in the fridge.  I divided the dough into two loaves on Saturday afternoon after I got home from teaching an all day beginning beekeeping class. Preparing the loaves and proofing the loaves in preparation for baking was a four hour process. Not that it required four hours of work on my part. It just took a certain amount of time for the dough to warm up so I could shape it into loaves, then some more time before the loaves were ready for the oven. I did two loaves because I was anxious to bake one loaf in our fireplace insert and one in the oven so I would be able to compare the results.

    As the time was approaching to bake the loaves, I preheated the oven to 550 degrees and started a fire in the fireplace insert.  I have a little temperature gauge that sits on top of our insert. In the past I've gotten it up as high as 750 degrees. This particular time I ran into problems. I was using poplar wood instead of maple and the highest I could get the insert was 420 degrees. That just wasn't hot enough to bake the bread so I ended up baking both loaves in our oven.  I didn't bake them both at the same time as I was trying to get the insert hot enough and it just wasn't working. It was pretty satisfying to produce a wonderful product. It smelled like sour dough, tasted like sour dough, and it had a wonderful texture.  It rose better than I expected and the original yeast culture was captured in our orchard about 100 feet away from the oven where the bread was baked.  Now if I can only manage to grow my own wheat...

Authentic Snohomish Sour Dough Bread

 

Fun with Beeswax

    We are very busy this time of year at the Beez Neez rendering out cappings wax so we will have a sufficient supply of beeswax for the coming season.  My personal production of beeswax would not constitute a drop in the bucket of our need for rendered beeswax. Fortunately I have a friend, a local Ukranian, who is a small scale commercial beekeeper.  He has about 600 hives and has neither the inclination or equipment to render out his cappings wax.  We are in the process of rendering out about 4 fifty gallon barrels of his cappings wax.  We will end up with about 450 pounds of beeswax by the time we are done.  My employee, Quentin, who is quite particular about a good many things, has worked out a good system for rendering the wax with our Walter Kelly Cappings Melter. We sell a lot of the unfiltered wax to beekeepers who melt it and paint it on to plastic foundation.  We also use a lot of it to make candles in the fall and winter months when things are a bit slower at the bee store.

Our Walter Kelly Cappings Melter

A portion of this years beeswax production

    The other day we had a minor accident with the cappings melter. We underestimated the amount of wax we had put into the cappings melter for the second melt and the five gallon bucket overflowed onto the concrete floor of the shop.  That is really no big deal as we can simply scrape the wax off the floor and melt it again. What was cool was this long thin blade of beeswax that formed as the wax ran over the side of the bucket.  I once saw a similar ribbon formation in the Sonora Caverns in Texas.  The cave formation took a very long time to develop while this happened in a matter of 20 minutes.

A wide ribbon of beeswax that formed from an overflow

The photo doesn't do this justice.

    I have to admit that I really do enjoy playing with the beeswax.  I like making candles and pouring the beeswax into molds.   That is one of the main reasons I do the candle classes. They really don't add much revenue to the store but I enjoy teaching the classes.  Its hard to beat beeswax candles and honey as Christmas gifts.  To plagiarize Jonathan Swift, it is the gift of "sweetness and light".