Farm and Soap Updates

I don't often share recipes here since following them is generally confined to baking in our household. Both my partner and I have a similar method of cooking where we poke around in the fridge for a few minutes to see what veggies we have and what meat is thawed, maybe look at a few recipes online or in cookbooks for inspiration and then proceed to fly by the seat of our pants! So this is less a recipe and more some general guidelines for putting together a quick tasty meal with whatever you have on hand. Ingredients: 3 tbsp....

If you've stumbled on to this recipe, you probably already know that fresh eggs are a beast to peel if boiled and that steaming is the solution! It's true, I use the steaming method to hard boil eggs that are only days old and the shells slip right off. First I'll give you the quick recipe, then you can scroll down if you want more details and pictures! How to Steam Hard Boiled Eggs (the short version) Set up your steamer, bring water to a boil. Put eggs in the steamer, cover tightly with lid. Steam for 6 minutes for soft...

Skip to: Chicken Digestion Goose Digestion Further Reading Cow Digestion As people learn about the benefits of grass-fed beef they often wonder if the same principle can be applied to other farm animals, which then leads to the question: Do your chickens eat grain or are they also grass-fed? To fully answer that question (and if you don't want full and detailed explanations, you should probably stop reading my blog posts!) we have to first understand a bit about animal digestion. The cow is a ruminant. This means that it has a system of stomachs (four in this case) which...

Animal fats are far less common in our daily lives than in the past and in recent decades there has been a push to remove them from not only our diets but from our skin products. The result is that most people today are not very familiar with the different types and uses of animals fats. Did you know that prior to the widespread use of petroleum products, animal fats were used for anything from candles to axle grease, not to mention forming an important part of the diet. Here at Fat Chance Farm, we are, of course, big proponents of using...

Here's what the farm looked like on April 27th this year: Of course it was all melted by around noon the next day! In northern Vermont it's a good rule of thumb to keep your snow tires on from Halloween to Mother's Day, lest you incur the wrath of the spring snow storm. There's a saying about snow that its "poor man's fertilizer". Turns out this isn't just an old farmer's tale. All precipitation brings nitrates out of the atmosphere and on to the soil, the advantage of snow is that this fertilizer is "slow release" gradually soaking into the...