My sermon intro at the state pen this Sunday is about words. Stumbled across this article on the BBC site this morning. Interesting and fun.
I spent some time at the coffee shop this morning and started the last chapter. Sometimes that's the hardest part because it sets up all that follows. Get the start wrong and the rest will struggle.
Came home and worked up in Telos (the combo butcher and weaning area) getting it all cleaned up of the scrap wood and ready for Monday's "event."
As the time to butcher Itzhak nears I'm paying attention to my thoughts and emotions. Because we raised him by hand as a "bottle baby" he's extremely tame and comes running to the gate whenever I approach, loves scratches, and knows I'm the one who provides him with grain and alfalfa hay. When the time comes to lead him up to where I'll kill him he'll go along very willingly because a) he's a goat and has no way to understand what's coming, and b) he trusts me completely.
He'll walk about 50 yards to his death and I'll go on a guilt trip that may last a lot longer.
That doesn't make this wrong. It's the way nature works and has worked since God told Noah he could eat meat. He didn't go to the meat section in the back of the nearest Safeway. He killed an animal, cut it up, cooked it and ate it. I think a case could be made that what I'm about to do is closer to God's design than the meat department. And some angst strikes me as appropriate, even good, as it shows respect for creation.
One of the You Tube videos I watched on how to butcher a goat was done by a farmer in Wisconsin who admitted he was new to the task of butchering a goat and hadn't dressed out a deer in years. Accordingly he was a bit clumsy at some steps (I will be too!!), but one bit of his video impressed me. His wife was doing the camera work and he said that before they begin any butcher they pray, thanking God for his provision. I like that and decided I'll do the same.
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I wrote the above on Friday afternoon and then got distracted, forgetting to finish and post it. I've got a list of projects I want to get done while Pam's in AZ, decided I should get some of them checked off before the day was done, and....
I have to carry water to the goats and chickens in 5 gallon buckets, not my favorite part of life on Baker Rd. The weaning pen & shed ("Telos") are located about 140' from the pump house which has a hose bib as part of its plumbing. Alas, the PVC connections on that bib were broken so I went to Ace Hdw and got the parts and pieces to fix it, got that done, and then ran hose through the woods to the goat shed. I came up about 40' short so today I'll get another 50' length of hose. Now I can just turn on that faucet and fill the bucket in the shed.
I also did some work in the goat barn, unloading bags of grain and the feed pellets Sundae needs, refilling the mineral feeder, and mixing the dried peas into the grain. The peas are cheap and very high in protein, so it's a good way to supplement their feed.
Then I baked. For no particular reason I decided it was time to branch out from pies so I made cardamon toast. That's a Swedish thing that looks a lot like biscotti but is made from a "dough" that has cardamon, used in Scandinavian baking, as its key flavor. Pam left the recipe out and the couple of ingredients I didn't know where to find (her cupboards are like my tool boxes - seemingly a total mess, but the proprietor knows where everything is) so I went to work. Hmmmm.
This project involved the use of the mixer and I haven't taken the required certification course on the use of power tools in the kitchen. The good news: I could exchange Facebook text messages with Pam who walked me through the key steps. (Except for that one where you run it at very slow speed until the ingredients have blended together. It's OK; I cleaned it up.)
I put dough in quotes up there because what I ended up with was more of a gooey paste that stuck to everything. I expected something similar to the dough I get when making pie crusts. Nope. But there's no point stopping now, so I put them in the oven at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
What came out of the oven looked to me more like cardamon pancakes, but when I sent Pam a pic she said they didn't look too bad "for a first time" (how's that for a left-handed compliment?) so they sat on the racks to cool.
I was surprised that when I cut the loaves into slices they looked almost like what my mom and Pam make. More importantly, they taste the same. Which may explain why I've got a bellyache this morning.
That bellyache may be a problem later when I'm scheduled to do an 8-mile run, the longest I've done in decades. Temps will only be in the mid-70's but the humidity is going to stay in the 80% range. Hydration will be the issue.
Time to make myself some breakfast, feed the goats and chickens, and get this day rollin'!
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