A venture to the farm

So, a few weeks ago I was posting about my desire to get away from commercially produced food and animal product and "get back to the farm".  This should be relatively easy to do living in Southern, WI where many farms are only a 15 minute drive west of the Interstate.   It took me a couple weeks of researching and getting back to people.  Farmers are not nearly as internet dependent as we city folk and some have taken a full week to respond to my emails during this busy season of harvest.  I wanted to make it to the farmers markets these past 2 weekends, but my illness with vertigo and migraines prevented that.  Today, we woke up a little late for the farm markets and went out to breakfast.  Then we make a family break away to a small family hobby farm in Franksville.  They have apple orchards for fall, raspberries in season right now and a variety of other things, and a fall country store that will soon open with pumpkins, gourds and decorations.  Anyhow, the adult daughter at the property took us around and showed us all of her birds, some are hobby only and some are raised for meat.  They have pet ducks and chinese swans as well as I think French swans that were once only raised for Royalty!  They have a whole gaggle of white Christmas Geese being raised for the holidays....the turkeys for Thanksgiving are babies right now, just able to start getting out of their hen house to look around.  The egg laying hens were a blast, all different colors and personalities.  Sophie loved throwing them some seed and treat.  There were pet goats too, which Buddy just loved.

These are our eggs, noticed that out of two dozen there are very few white ones, most are some shade of green or brown.  This is related to the breed of the chicken and what is in their diet.  It makes a huge difference in thickness of their shell and in taste!


Sophie accidently cracked one on the way into the house, so we captured a pic to show how golden the yolks are and how even the egg white takes on a color from the diet, which is lots of grasses and grub, as well as left over vegetables at dinner and etc.
The chickens we purchased are going to be the true test of this.  I have long begun to despise cooking chicken at home due to the dried out flavorless pieces you end up with.  Even buying "Amish" chicken that you'd think was raised better hasn't necessarily been better.   So, this is the least my chicken has ever traveled to make it to my table...20 miles!  I bought 2 chickens, they are sold for $3 a lb.  These are not your average teeny little store bought chickens...these babys have muscle and are very lean and heavy duty, one weight in at 6lb and the other at 7lb.  The first thing the farmer mentioned and the next I noticed is they are not a skin and bone with some slimy breast meat in there like you are accustomed to from the store....these babys look more like small turkeys!  There is no way we would eat a whole roast chicken just us of that size without having to eat it for a week...so I plan to try my hand at cutting down and deboning tomorrow and freezing it into multi meal portions.  I can't wait to see how it tastes!

(2) Organic, Free Range chickens, farm direct, $3 lb...these babies are 5-7 lbs each!

Then after we left that farmer, we found a roadside stand with lots of fresh from the earth finds....so fresh that the potatoes are in a bucket of dirt and you pick them out yourself and clean them at home!  They look fantastic....all my produce cost me a grand total of $10.50.  Between the eggs, the 2 hearty multi meal chickens and the produce, I spent all told about $50 today....and it felt so good to give it to the people who worked hard to make it instead of to a grocery store.

Farm Stand finds

Then home it was to put all my other shopping from pick n save and aldi away, and I made burgers on the grill complete with smokey BBQ sauce, bleu cheese, avacado, tomatoe and lettuce.

Complete with a big salad of mixed baby greens, farmstand grape tomatoes, orange and red bell pepper strips and bleu cheese and  vidalia onion dressing. 

The kids loved the farm and playing with the birds and goats.  Sophie is getting the idea of where food really is supposed to come from and is already denouncing fast food on her own without alot of prompting from me.  Buddy is a harder sell, but we do have him down to one happy meal a weekend and that is it.  That is a huge improvement from where we were, he would drive a hard bargain and "expect" one for every task he completed.  We are happy to break that cycle.  He is better for it, now we just hope and pray he opens his palate a bit more!

DH and I have each lost about 6 lbs during this venture, most of it appears to have come off in waist measurement sheerly as water loss and loss of "swelling" in overall tissues as the toxic salts of fast food make their way our of our bodies.  After 17 days Fast Food Free, I am no longer craving taco bell as I drive by and the idea of a burger from any fast food chain now that I know about the feed lots and the fact that I'd be eating burgers from 1,000 cows at a time (This is per the CDC)...I can "just say no" and eat a snack or get home for lunch!