A New Year

A happy new year to all!

We here have been keeping busy with visiting friends,working, playing relaxing and planning.

On New Years' Eve, Karen and I travelled northward to visit with a group of dear friends to ring in the new year. Our hostesses supplied the gang with some wonderful paper lanterns. We each lit a piece of cardboard below the open lantern, which filled the lantern with hot air, much like a miniature version of a hot air balloon. Out on the ice of a north Wisconsin lake, we lit our lanterns, and filled them with mental hopes and wishes, and let them soar skyward. We couldn't believe how far up they went! The lanterns themselves don't come down until they have completely finished burning. So I guess that means they don't really come down! They were really very cool.

It's been snowy and cold. Before this last week, temps averaged around 10 degrees for highs, lows a few degrees below zero. But we have had a reprieve the last week, with highs in the low to mid 30's, bringing us our much enjoyed January Thaw. We never had one of those last year.

The other day I rendered our own lard from the fat from our last pig. It was very easy. The butcher ground up the fat for us, and we got it back in large bags, about the size of a basketball. I haven't weighed them, but we got 5 or 6 bags like this from one whole hog. Our butcher doesn't have the ability to render the lard. I thought this might be a big messy process, but it's really very easy. Just put the entire contents from one bag into the crock pot
and set it on low overnight. Next morning, it was all cooked down. I poured the liquid off into mason jars through a cheesecloth to catch the solids (which are called cracklins. Remember Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister being so excited about getting the cracklins after Ma and Pa butchered the hog?)



The end result was pure, white, beautiful lard. This will make the very best pie crust possible. This picture is just after I poured in the warm lard - once it solidified it turned white. I got two full mason jars plus a little bit more, maybe a cup's worth. This will keep for a very long time just in jars in a cool, dark place. It can also be frozen if desired.

As far as the cracklins, we did not want to eat them like Laura and her sister, but we didn't want them to go to waste, either. So I gave most of them to our chickens, doled out in reasonable portions. They sure did love the mid-winter snack of fat and protein. I also used some leftovers in my wild bird suet feeder. They loved it too, and it brings the prettiest woodpeckers right up next to our kitchen window.

Otherwise we have been busy poring over seed catalogs and workshop schedules. We plan on attending at least a couple good farming and grazing workshops before this winter is over. Additionally, we are hoping to be able to put up a barn this year, if possible. We need better storage for the tractor and other equipment, and we also want a place to house pigs during bad weather to get them off the fields to prevent soil damage. It isn't easy to design one building that meets such different needs.