March Challange..

Good Afternoon on this cold end of Feb day in the tail end of winter..  We are below -20 with wind chill taking us down to the frost bite warnings.. so of course we have a new set of twins in the barn. Twin Ram lambs this time.. One big! white boy and smaller chocolate ram lamb, (nicknames only) is flop ear for the white and mudpuddle for the colored boy.

So far this year we have a 50/50 split on lamb sex’s born and two sets of twins.. we will see what comes with the other ewes.

If you have been reading the blog for a while, you will know that March was known as the starving month in the old days, the stores were getting lower, certain foods were turning, the ground up here is frozen solid, the waterways are getting thinner and ice fishing is becoming unsafe but nothing is growing..

That is part of the reason that the sap starting to flow was so important to drink the half way there sap water, it was a burst of fresh in the very hard part of winter.

I have traditionally for the years I have been blogging done an Eat out of your Pantry only challenge, its been outstanding at finding the holes in my programs, some years it really showed me area’s I needed to improve in and other years we pretty much went just fine, we had milking going, we had eggs coming in, we had rabbits and a lamb to butcher, we had fresh sprouts and in-house greens grown.

So this March, I am mixing it up..

I am going to be butchering one of my largest just turned Hogget, which pretty close to the size of an average deer doe and we are going to process him down and show all different kinds of ways to use different parts, odd bits, hide, bones and so forth.

A lot of the recipes will use root veggies, dried items that would have been should be available in storage still and we will see what I can find to forage to go with!

I will be sharing my own personal favorites but I am also going to be reaching out and trying a few new recipes from my huge Nordic cookbook. There are some interesting flavour combo’s in there to say the least.

I have a very busy month coming in terms of classes, seminars, course’s and training days so I took a good hard look at the calendar and the farm. I will be sharing as I go on a number of those with updates and of course I will keep up on the photography twice a week as well.