Udderly Delicious: Lemon Ice Cream with Blackberry Sauce

(pardon my chipped bowl)

I'm torn on how to label this. It's part Udderly Delicious, part Quick Eats, and part Homegrown. Regardless of the label, it's really freaking tasty.

Sadly I didn't take any photos of the process, so this will be a relatively wordy post. My family was in town for their first visit to the farm and, after K and my father went on an epic berry picking expedition which ended with about three pounds of blackberries being collected, I figured we should put them to use.

The next night I was going to cook up a turkey that we had raised. My sister from over at Fancypants Tris suggested making a blackberry and chipotle sauce for the turkey, but I decided to do a straight up brined and roasted turkey.  While the turkey was roasting, I figured I might as well put some more of our goat milk to use and thought some ice cream might be worth trying.

Udderly Delicious: Coming soon!

This is Josie, one of our dairy goats. From her and Jenni, another goat we purchased so she wouldn't be lonely, we get about half a gallon of milk each day.  That's way more than we drink, so we decided to try our hand at some cheesemaking.

Homegrown: Pork, Parsnips and Greens

My neighbors! I'm sorry for leaving you without my endless ramblings for so long, but life (including the flu) sometimes catches you off guard. Let's get right to it!

"Do you know where your food comes from?"

These days, how often do we hear this question? And do we truly know the answer? How many times do we blindly pick up a package of steaks or a head of lettuce with no concern over how it made it from farm to store? I never thought much about it until I started living with ducks. Our layers are pretty consistent, so we have a steady supply of eggs. When we run out and I have to buy chicken eggs, I kind of panic. What were these chickens eating? Were they healthy? Well kept? Did they have bumblefoot? (We had a case of bumblefootwith one of our ducks. It's apparently common in poultry, and probably pretty common in commercial poultry farms. I'll let you read up on it yourself.) I'm amazed, after buying eggs, how watery and weak tasting they are. I can easily replace "2 eggs" in a recipe with just a single duck egg. (Look back to my Cheese-Stuffed Meatballs for an example.) I see the ducks who lay these eggs every day. We feed them and care for them. I know where these eggs come from. And they're freaking delicious. (Don't worry. We'll have some egg recipes in the near future!)