A Goaty Tale

We love to eat goat meat and whenever we visited Kim's brother we would always came back with an esky full of goat meat. He lives at Aramac and had a nice little herd of goats. Once we started the free range pork business we decided to offer goat meat as well, so that meant we became goat breeders with our own little goat herd. 

We've gradually built up numbers by keeping our own females and occasionally bringing in some live nannies from Aramac. In the meantime we ate the odd goat from our neighbour. No we aren't into goat stealing, Kim would help him kill one or two and we'd get some of the meat. This meat was much nicer than our own goat meat (my apologies to any customers reading this). For some reason that I am unaware of (although I am positive that's what he told us), we had thought his goats were Anglo Nubian, which is a duel purpose breed - meaning good for milk and meat. For the last twelve months or more we've been trying to get an Anglo Nubian billy. We drove all the way to Kingaroy once to pick up one but when we got there we discovered that they were another totally different breed, British Alpine, and when I googled them (at the farm) it stated that they were not suitable for the tropics.  We decided not to take them, but because we'd travelled so far he gave us a whether of very dubious age. We ended up eating him and he too was very tasty. 

So back on the trail of getting our hands on a billy. The next time we rang about one, the breeder bred Anglo Nubian and Kalahari Reds. She had one of the latter available and seeing as we desperately needed a bully we took him instead. All this while we kept asking our neighbour for one oh his billies. Finally just after we got onto another Anglo Nubian billy, our neighbour sold us a nanny with a billy kid. The Anglo Nubian we bought was a totally different looking animal to the neighbours. When I mentioned this to the neighbour he was quite emphatic that his breed were definitely Saanen! We have been looking for the wrong breed the whole time!

And now we have lost the little billy kid to some sort of predator. I don't think we are meant to have a Saanen.  The funny thing was that when we went to buy the goat that turned out to be a British alpine, it was the colour of it that made me double check the breed - Anglo Nubians happen to look more like a British alpines, and nothing like saanen!

Further to the story about our Saanen nanny that is kidless.....She's not terribly quiet and I would see her with her bulging udder and feel sorry for her, but I could never catch her to do anything about it. The other day I went out to the goat paddock and she had her head stuck in the fence. I grabbed a dish and milked her out. Everyday she gets her head stuck so I've been milking her out every day. Then I decided to give the milk to one of our poddies who hasn't been drinking the calf powdered milk and is a little bit sick looking. The little goat drank the goats milk straight away. Makes sense really. 

We have 8 poddy goats at the moment and I had thought about trying to see if the nanny will take one of the kids so maybe I should see if my sick little one will bond with her and her with it.

They are cute when they are like the above photo, but not so cute like the below one. I have also had to banish them from the house yard as they have stripped every plant they could reach and managed to get under my bird netting in the garden!

What's happening at my place

We've had rain recently (a lot of it) and since then it's been unseasonably warm. My asparagus thinks it's spring even though I'm sure it's going to get cold again. For the last couple of years I have not really been good to my asparagus bed and this year I had fully intended to cut it back and mulch it as soon as it got cold. However, I've only done one bed already so today I started to to tidy the second bed. I did run out of time, but I've weeded all the couch and the next job is to cut back the ferns, put on some compost and mulch hay.

My lime tree has been producing so many limes for a while now and there's still quite a few on the tree and it's flowering again. Just about every meal has lime included somehow, even if it's only in some soda water to drink!

Lately I don't bother to pick the limes until they start to colour. Makes it easier to see them in the tree.

We are eating some veg out of the garden too, although I did stock up at the markets this weekend just to make sure we have some variety and because my garden can't supply enough. One day........

I found a couple of capsicums amongst my chillies. I had two plants but I thought they were both chillies. Pleasant surprise.

I'm making pretty good bread lately (sourdough) and tonight I did a free form loaf and it looks pretty good! I use khorasan (kamut) flour, which is an old variety of wheat, a bit like spelt, but I think it makes a much nicer loaf than spelt. I use a rye starter, which is just about impossible to ruin and just about always comes up nice and bubbly.

Lucy's Kitchen

Anyone who has been following this blog for a while, would know that I'm quite passionate about food. Especially made from scratch, home grown, healthy food - slow food! A while ago we had a backpacker staying with us who was into technology and he tried to convince me that I should video myself while cooking. He felt that I could show better then tell people how I cook. I do kind of agree with him, because I tend to make things up as I go along and I could explain what I'm doing as I do it. Often I'll have a plan in my head of what I'm going to cook, but change my mind half way through. Not sure if this would make for good viewing or not. But anyway, I'm not quite ready to go to the full on video concept, but I have decided to start a Facebook page focused on what I cook and eat, each day (or most days). I'm also planning on starting a YouTube channel too, so stay posted for that.

It's not hard to cook good healthy wholesome and tasty food, but you need to have a basic cooking ability, good ingredients and the confidence to give it a go. It also helps to have a bit of an understanding of flavours and what works and what doesn't. This can be learnt, although it does come more easily for some people than others.

I'm a pretty busy person, but I do prioritise food time. I make time to make real food - fermented vegetables, yoghurt and cheese, sourdough bread, kombucha and kefir, baked beans, etc. The essential thing to do with this, is to plan. You can't just wake up in the morning and decide to have baked beans for breakfast - you need to think about baked beans for breakfast 24 hours before you want to eat them. But with a little planning and cooking ahead, you can take a container of baked beans out of the freezer and have them for breakfast. It's about forming habits - taking meat out of the freezer, feeding the sourdough starter, making bone broth, bottling kombucha, growing herbs, growing vegetables.

So, if you would like to see what happens in my kitchen on an almost daily basis, please pop over to Facebook, find my page, like it and keep up-to-date with what I'm doing. If you want me to share recipes, please ask me. Sometimes I keep it brief, but I'm happy to share recipes when I can. Sometimes it's not a recipe, but a concept. Sometimes I just like to show that it's not so hard to cook a really nice meal, in a very short time, or it can take all day to cook a really nice meal! Just be warned, you won't see fancy photo's of staged food. I'm a cook, not a photographer (or a fancy cheffy type with my plating up either).

Hopefully that link works. If not search for it. Use the picture below as an example, so that you know you've got the right one (there's a few Lucy's Kitchens on Facebook). I am sometimes technologically challenged!

Lucy's Kitchen