farm

snack time with chickies!

in

our chickies are not so little anymore! they are like full on teenagers, complete with feathers and the ability to fly. there they are eating watermelon with eggboy at two weeks old, and the photos with the cucumber were taken just last week, when they were a little over a month old. can you believe how quickly they've grown?! remember when they had just hatched??

here are some things that happened in month one:

-they took lots of little dirt baths

-they ate watermelon, cucumber, pulp from our juicer, and bugs

-we discovered that the free straight run exotic chick that came with our flock might actually be a rooster

-they got to meet mum (their grandma!) who said, on a very hot day, what happens when it gets too hot? do we get chicken nuggets?

-they accidentally got into rat poison that we didn't know was left in our garage from when egggrandma lived here and we freaked out completely and went to the vet who gave us little vitamin k shots to give to all of them and they're all ok now but it was scary.

-eggboy spent a lot of time and got very sweaty converting the old playhouse in our backyard into their coop

-one of them got a little wound so we tied a bandage on her leg and she spent the day inside with me. we split a cucumber. she's ok now.

being a chicken mama is hard work! but it's so worth it just to watch all of them waddle and run around and cuddle with each other and cock their heads all adorably to the side. it's so freaky to watch them grow so quickly and i thought that once they got past their newly hatched ball-of-fluff stage they wouldn't be as cute, but oh man, they're still so cute. they are feathery balls of glee that make me so darn happy i could spit. 

-yeh!

thank you so much to the american egg board for sponsoring this post!!! being a chicken mama has helped me gain a whole new appreciation for the farmers who are a part of this board. eggboy and i are seeing first hand how important it is to make sure our chickies get enough light, safe housing, and nutrients, and i can't even imagine what it would be like to have to care for tons more hens like the farmers on the egg board do. did you know that 208 million eggs are laid each day in america and most of those eggs are laid between 7am and 11am?? i can't wait to have a freshly laid omelette from my hens once they start laying :) to find out more about where eggs come from, check out incredibleegg.org!

 

 

 

meet our chickies!!!!!

in

ok, i get it. i get why all of you like posting pictures of your pets and offspring. i get it. you were right. it's all i want to do. 

because ohmygahhh i'm a chicken mama!!!!!!!!!!

these little ladies are the greatest. they were hatched just about a week ago and already they've grown so much! they're so fluffy and goofy. all day long they peck and waddle and scoop up water with their little beaks. and the poop! they poop so much.

at night they all pile on top of each other and sleep in a little mountain of chick, it is so cute i could cry. 

all of their names are macaroni for now. once we can tell all 15 of them apart, we'll give them grownup lady names, like curer bell and robert galbraith. 

hehe.

ok it's been a whole five minutes since i last checked on them, so i'm going to go do that.

bye!

-yeh!

 

a little tractor adventure

in , , ,

well, it was a big tractor, but a little adventure.

the tractor needed a new part, so eggboy had to drive it to the fix-it man.

junior cat was not allowed to come.

but i was! here is the view from the buddy seat as we drove down the highway and stopped traffic. tractors don't go very fast! eggboy was focused on not hitting any bunnies but he still smiled for my rearview mirror picture. what a guy.

(no cars ahead of us, they are all stuck behind us.)

we even drove across the bridge to north dakota.

past my favorite sign... 

and my other favorite sign... (look, the grain mill in the background!)

and then we arrived at the tractor fix-it place on the edge of town, where a row of combines welcomed us with glee.

eggdad picked us up in his pickup and gave us popcorn because you can get free popcorn at a lot of the farm shops in town. it was salty and tasty and perfect with eggboy's hat sweat. 

the end!

-yeh!

chocolate hazelnut cake with vanilla hazelnut buttercream

in ,

sometimes living on a farm feels like living in one great big jungle gym. there's tons of exploring to be done, secret forts (err-- cake houses) to be built, rogue patches of rhubarb to pick, and things to climb on. a small round bowl-cut 1993 version of myself would have given anything to hang out on this farm. i was always getting into trouble climbing on our piano and on the fancy statues at ravinia. (in junior high this manifested itself in an indoor rock climbing phase and the aol screen name of roxclimber1. *i know*)

these days it's usually eggboy and eggdad that do the climbing. they climb up into grain bins and onto trucks and tractors for all sorts of reasons, but by far the coolest climbing thing on our farm is a 110 foot grain leg. (here's a visual. the tallest part is the leg, and the things around it are bins.) there are stairs all the way up, and currently there are christmas lights on it to make it look like a candy cane.

but when i say it's the coolest climbing thing, i actually mean it's the scariest climbing thing. i went up there once and it was enough. it was super windy and it sort of felt like being at the top of a roller coaster, only on a roller coaster you're strapped in, so...

the eggparents love it though! they climb up and down when they're preparing for hiking trips, and sometimes they use it as some sort of nutso party trick. i'm pretty sure that some of our wedding guests went up there past dark. oh goodness, i could never do that.

since the lights are up this year, apparently climbing up at night is a hotter ticket than normal, so eggdad commissioned me to make this cake for a darned grain leg climbing party. apparently he's having friends over and we're (they're) going to put coveralls on, climb the grain leg all together, and then come back down and eat cake. sounds horrifying. but you know me: any excuse to make a cake.

squirrels climb, squirrels like nuts, i've never eaten an acorn though, so here's a chocolate hazelnut cake with a marzipan squirrel! it's super lovely and nutty and it has a vanilla hazelnut buttercream filling. it's totally half-able or cupcake-able, and if you'd prefer another marzipan critter, mr. squirrel will be sad but he'll get over it.

chocolate hazelnut cake with vanilla hazelnut frosting

makes one 2-layer 8-inch cake

ingredients

cake:

1 c roasted unsalted hazelnuts, plus more for decorating

1 3/4 c sugar

2 1/4 c flour

1/2 c unsweetened cocoa powder

1 1/2 tsp baking powder

1 1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 tsp kosher salt

2 large eggs

1 c milk

1/2 c vegetable or canola oil

1 tb vanilla extract

3/4 c boiling water

frosting:

1 lb unsalted butter, softened

4 2/3 c powdered sugar

a good pinch of kosher salt

1 tb vanilla extract

decorating:

marzipan kneaded with food coloring, cut into cute shapes

clues

cake:

preheat oven to 350.

grease two 8-inch round cake pans and line the bottoms with parchment.

place the hazelnuts in a food processor and grind them until you have small crumbs. measure out 1/4 cup of the crumbs and set them aside for the filling.

pour the remaining crumbs into a large bowl and whisk in the rest of the dry ingredients. in a medium bowl, whisk together all of the wet ingredients except for the boiling water. whisk the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and then stir in the boiling water. it will be a very thin batter. pour into cake pans and bake until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. begin checking for doneness at 28 minutes.

let the cakes cool in the pans for 10 minutes, and then turn them onto a greased cooling rack.

frosting:

use an electric mixer to beat together the butter, powdered sugar, salt, and vanilla until smooth. measure out one cup of the frosting and transfer it to a small bowl. fold in the reserved 1/4 cup of ground hazelnuts. 

assembly:

level your cake layers and spread the top of one of them with the hazelnutty frosting. place the other layer on top, and then frost all over with the remaining frosting. decorate with marzipan cutouts, crushed hazelnuts, sprinkles, or whatever else you'd like!

enjoy!