We moved the calves

The only bit of decent pasture we have left is a plot behind the house.  Horses are really hard on pasture, and this is the only place they've not been grazing on.  A lot of the grass there is still green, even as we are getting ready to move on into December.

The calves are about five weeks old, maybe six.  It's really funny that these are the first calves I've ever purchased whose arrival date I didn't write down somewhere.  But the first pictures I put on Facebook were taken October 21.  They're growing well, still taking milk replacer and eating probably four or five pounds of calf starter (grain) between them every day.

Yesterday I suggested to Cliff that we move the calves behind our house instead of in the little barn lot in front.  "They are trying to pick at the dry, brown weeds in the little lot," I told him, "and there can't be any food value there.  There is still good grass behind the house."

"How are we going to get two calves through the yard, around the house, to the back?" Cliff asked.  

"Easy.  I'll mix up some milk replacer, and put it in the bottles; they'll follow us anywhere."

He seemed skeptical, but decided to go put electric fence across the plot of grass to keep the calves close to the house at the start and see what happened.  Cliff had put up a small stretch of electric fence in the barn lot when we first got them so they'd be trained and know what it was whenever we turned them out to pasture.   This always works well, although if calves realize they are free from their original pen they sometimes take off running.  In that case, they are liable run right through the electric fence before they even see it the first time; after that, they usually pay attention and stay away from it.  

I half-filled two calf bottles with milk replacer.  Both Cliff and I had a bottle, and everything went as planned.  They each followed us through the gate of the lot, around the house, and through the gate into their new home.  Cliff had already moved the calf hutches back there, side by side.  That area is unprotected from the north wind, so they had to have some place of refuge.

They finished their bottles, saw the feed boxes with grain in it and immediately dived in for a brief bite, and then discovered the green grass at their feet and started grazing.  One of them wandered near the electric fence out of curiosity and got shocked, then went back to grazing.  

I can still look out the north windows and see them nearby, which is almost a necessity these days.  I am just not as vigilant as I once was, and I need every trick in the book to keep me attentive to their needs.  

As I create this entry, Cliff is out doing the rest of the preparation for the calves' winter home.

He's bedding them down with plenty of straw, securing the hutches so they won't blow away, and doing all the other mundane things that are necessary.  From there on, it's my project again.

I made the mistake of telling Cora we were going to eat the calves when they are big.  "You're going to eat my calves?"  (I never told her they were hers, but she figures everything around this place is hers.)

"Yes, when they're big," I answered.  

"I don't want you to do that."

"Oh.  Well, what if we just sell them?"

That, she decided, would be fine with her.  Keep in mind that I did not say we WOULD sell them.  But I will choose my words wisely when the time comes to take them to the butcher shop.  

Too much food

I realize there's always too much food on Thanksgiving, but this year for some reason it was extreme.  We had a few last-minute no-shows, but that really doesn't account for such a surplus.  

When the day was over, I brought the turkey-bones back here to make turkey frame soup.  Every year I tell anybody around who will listen to me:  "Don't throw away your turkey bones!"  

There was still a generous amount of meat on the bones of our bird.  With so much meat, I decided to make two one-gallon bags of turkey broth with meat to put in the freezer from the one turkey, instead of one.

Getting all these good fixin's is a messy proposition:  You take all the remains of the cooked bird and boil them for ninety minutes, which means you will have the largest pan in the house to clean up later.  When it's done, you set a colander atop another "biggest pan in the house" and start pouring the contents of the first pan through the colander into the second.  Now you have two more things to wash, and if you're a slob like me, you've splashed quite a bit of broth around the kitchen.

Take the colander filled with drained chicken off that (second) pan and set the pan aside.  Get a container to hold the meat you're going to coax off the bones, and start hunting for meat.  Usually I'll end up with at least two cups for the soup, even on the sparest turkey frame.  Now you will spend at least thirty minutes picking the skin off what you've collected  and picking tiny pieces of meat out of the backbone and neck bone.  If turkey frame soup wasn't so good, I wouldn't put myself through all this.

So, I had already processed two turkey frames this week when son-in-law Kevin came home from his family Thanksgiving dinner at Carthage carrying a couple of Walmart bags with two turkey frames.  My cup runneth over!  As he handed the bagged-up remains to me, he said, "I'm pretty sure there's still a lot of meat on these."

I would rather have put these bones into the freezer and worked on them some other day, having already been through the mess the day before.  But neither of the carcasses would have fit into a gallon freezer bag.  I shoved it all in the refrigerator and went to bed.  Awake at four Sunday morning, I drank a cup or two of coffee and realized my best bet was to go ahead and boil these babies, pick the meat off the bones, put the broth and meat in the freezer, and be done with it.  Once more I was up to my elbows in a turkey mess, and I got turkey frame number 3 for the year cooked before church.  By the time we got home, it was cool enough to prepare for the freezer and I got number four cooking.  That last carcass is chilling on the cold back porch waiting for me to separate the meat from bones today.

I found out Kevin's remark about "a lot of meat" was an understatement.  There was so much of it, I actually saved two pints of chopped meat for casseroles.

What you see in the green bowl is the turkey I'll put back in the broth to freeze for soup (Another bowl to wash.)  I suppose we'll be eating a lot of turkey this winter, but I'm armed with a lot of casserole and soup recipes.

Friends on Facebook posted pictures of their lovely table settings and seasonal decorations; I was impressed, believe me.  We spend our holidays in the shop with the big Oliver 1855.  It's green, so I guess that would count as a Christmas decoration.  There's a furnace out there, and sometimes a wood stove, so it's cozy.  We have lots of folding picnic tables and plenty of throwaway plates and plastic utensils.  If there are children, as there were at the Fourth of July gathering, they can run and play and shout.  The worst part of holding a feast in the shop is getting all the food out there after it's prepared.  And the coffeepot, creamer, sugar... stuff like that.  But a lot of the food is brought by guests, and it doesn't matter where they have to carry their offerings.  

I went out to the shop refrigerator this morning to make sure nothing was rotting in there.  All I found was a veggies-and-dip tray.  I ate some today with my turkey frame soup, but I knew we could never eat all those munchies before they ruined.

But wait!  I can cook all those, and there's plenty there to cook.  Those peas would be nice in a stir-fry.  

Thanksgiving is still my favorite holiday, and yet it's always sort of a relief to have it behind me.  

Peace.