Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Cream Line Baby!

Not much of a post, just wanted to show off my lines......

Cream lines that is!

This is milk from Tulip....

Look at that cream line!


It's no wonder it's so rich, creamy, and delicious!

Happy milking, wherever you are!

Till next time....

God Bless,

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Deep Thoughts......A Crisis of Religion, but Not of Faith.........

If you are a long time reader of my blog, you may remember that for most of our marriage we weren't regular church attendees.  God has always been our constant, and the driving force in our lives, but we didn't attend organized religious services.

There are a whole lot of reasons why we didn't attend regularly, and I won't get into those here, but we never lacked for a close relationship with God, which to my mind is what matters more than anything.

Shortly after we moved down here to KY, The Man's sister lost her husband after a long illness, and his funeral was preached by a hell fire and brimstone preacher who inspired us to begin attending church.  It was wonderful!  Uplifting and inspiring and most Sundays a wonderful jolt to the spirit.

We attended every Sunday until we moved to Montana, and then as soon as we came back we went right back.  I think we only missed two Sundays in over 2 years.....

The last few months however, we began to notice some things that made us increasingly uncomfortable.  Certain things that weren't exactly Biblically correct.  Things that just began to bother us more and more.  Also, after that amount of time attending every Sunday, we began to notice that the sermon was pretty much exactly the same every Sunday.  The same message, and sometimes not a Biblically correct message.  This really began to wear on us.  

We prayed and prayed and we continued to attend, but things just kept getting worse and worse and we felt it was time to leave.

That was about 2 months ago I suppose, and we've tried a couple of different churches since.  We've also missed a few Sundays, not attending anywhere.  We are still praying for God's direction.  We have not found a church home.  We still talk in depth about God as a family every day.  God isn't just on Sunday morning to us.  God is every day, every moment, every second.  His love and His presence permeates every aspect of our lives as it always has.

Church is important, but it absolutely doesn't substitute for that close personal relationship with God.  You can't have a true relationship with Him if you are eating with a spoon everything the preacher is saying on Sunday morning and never learning to feed yourself.  If you don't study the Bible and have deep conversations with others outside of the church, you won't know, or notice if and when your preacher strays from the Word.

I'm so thankful to live in a country where you can own a Bible and can read and study God's word at any time you want.  I have a Bible in the car, at my desk at work, on the bench beside where I sit at the table, and in the bathroom.  God's word is never far away from me and I can read it any time I want.  I can also pray and talk to God at any time.  This is the beautiful thing about a relationship with God.  He is never out of reach!

So we are in search of a church.  And we sort of feel as if we are in a bit of a crisis of religion.

A crisis of religion, but not a crisis of Faith!

Till next time.....

God Bless,

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Let's Go Find the Goats!

Would you like to come with me to visit the goats?

First we have to find them.....

Oh there they are, browsing in the thick brush.....


Here is Tulip, but where are Star and all the babies??


Ahh, here they are!  The babies are almost always with Star....


Here is our beautiful girl Erika.  She is Tulip's doeling, and thanks to the kindness of Jennifer, she's going to be staying here with us, along with Merida.  As Jen pointed out, this will leave me with Tulip's first daughter Star, and her last daughter Erika....She's a funny, sweet doeling with a lot of her Mama's personality traits.  She doesn't like to be held, but she loves to be scratched and rubbed and will stand next to you forever if you'll just keep scratching and stroking her!


And here's my lovely girl Merida, she just gets sweeter every day....


She's got such a funny, sweet personality and her favorite place is still in my lap...


Here is little Miss Fancy Pants, stretching up to eat the dead leaves, because who wants to eat fresh green food when you can eat the dried stuff....


And here is Bear showing Mama how rough and tough he is by beating up this tree...


And now everybody is browsing on the tender young growth.  So happy and carefree is the life of a goat!


Erika and Merida say thanks for stopping by!!


Come see us again soon!

Till next time, 

God Bless,









Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Chocolate Mint Soap......Soap-fully It'll Be Good.............


Sunday was rainy and nasty, so while The Man left to go mushroom hunting over at our aunt and uncle's farm, I stayed home to mill some soap and do some other things.

I had the bright idea to make some chocolate mint soap so flying by the seat of my pants....away I went!

First I went out my front door to my flower bed and picked some chocolate mint.  

Then I brought it in and chopped it up, and put it in some goat milk in a pan on the stove and let it cook over a very slow heat, stirring it once in awhile and making sure not to let it stick.


Meanwhile, I got my grated soap ready to go......12 ounces of it.


After the mint and milk had cooked together till the mint was pretty wilty and the milk was a nice pale green and smelled really good....


 I strained the mint out and weighed the milk.... 


Then I poured 9 oz of minty milk into the grated soap.....


And let it melt down...
I had hoped that it would stay a nice mint green color, but that didn't happen, so I decided to go a different direction.......


I decided to add in some cocoa powder just for funsies....


Which made the soap look like this.....


I'm calling it Mint Brownie Batter


And then I had plenty of minty milk left over, so I made another batch, this time adding brown sugar and cinnamon....


I'm calling it Brown Sugar Cinnamon Mint....

Because I'm super creative like that....


And this is all the soap I've milled so far this year, from the basic soap I made a while ago...

It's all pretty mixed up, but straight across from left to right is Mint Brownie Batter, Brown Sugar Cinnamon Mint, Wheat Germ and Honey, and then that pretty golden colored bar is Lemongrass Cornmeal....


So this should give me plenty of soap to get through for quite awhile!

Till next time....

God Bless,



Sunday, April 19, 2015

Hunting, Preparing, and Preserving Morel Mushrooms - It's Mushroom Season Baby!

I've been hunting morels since I was a little girl with my dad, and The Man has been doing the same with his step-dad.  I learned my love of the woods from Dad, and remember following him over logs, through briars, and up and down hills from when I was an itty bitty. 

Dad doesn't particularly like to eat morels, but Mom loves them so when I was a kid we went every year.  At first he would find them and point them out to me and let me pick them.  Then he began to force me to get better at it, and he would say STOP!!  Do you see them?  Look around, and I'd look around until I saw the mushroom and then I'd bend down and pick it.

Then when The Man and I got married, we started hunting together.

People will tell you all kinds of "stuff" about finding mushrooms.

"Stuff" like....morels grow around dead trees, mostly elm.....or they like moist ground.....or they like dry ground.....or they are up when the apple trees are blooming, or when the apples trees are done or blah blah blah.

Let me fill you in on some life changing intel on hunting mushrooms...........

THEY GROW WHERE THEY GROW

Ha, but seriously......they really do grow where they grow.

You may have the greatest best most productive 'shroom patch ever, and hunt there for 3 or 4 years straight and then go back one spring and not find a thing.

The bottom line when hunting mushrooms is that the weather conditions have to be right at the right time, and you have to cover some ground.  You have to walk, and walk, and walk some more!  In a good year like this one, you'll find them everywhere and won't hardly be able to walk without stepping on them.  In years like this, The Man hunts every second he can.  Rain or shine, he's out hunting mushrooms.  I'm not that hardy, and don't like to hunt in the rain!

Now as for how do you know what mushrooms you can eat and live to see another day??

I don't know about anything but Morels.  I wish I did, but I don't.

As far as I know there is no other mushroom that looks like a morel.  They are very distinctive looking.


Down here folks call them "dry land fish".  I guess maybe because they sort of look as if they have gills?  I really have no clue why.  This site will show you pictures of what they call "false morels" but to me they don't look anything like a morel.  A real morel is hollow inside and when you slice it in half, it's hollow.

I'm sure this post wasn't  helpful in the least, but if you'd like to go out hunting morels here is what we always take with us...

Our 'shroomin' sticks....The Man carved these for us out of cedar limbs....they are about 5 1/2 feet long or so.....



7 Dust.  This works better in our minds for keeping ticks off than Off ever could, and it doesn't leave a terrible taste in your mouth.

A sack.  This can be an empty bread sack, a plastic bag, a basket, bucket, anything you can tote your mushrooms in.  In the park it is the law that you have to use a mesh bag, so we use empty onion sacks.

A lunch.  Trust me, you are going to be having such a great and peaceful day enjoying the woods that you aren't going to want to have to go home and eat!

A camera.  Optional but nice to have so you can take pictures of anything interesting you may see.

Now after you've found your nice haul of mushrooms....


What do you do with them?

We cut them in half length-wise.....


And put them in a bowl, usually a butter bowl, or an ice cream bucket depending on how many we've got.......

You can see the hollowness of the mushrooms in this picture.
Then cover them with water, and sort of gently rinse them because they will be full of little bugs.....

Now add a bit of salt, and put them in the fridge over night.

Then they are ready to be rinsed and either fried up immediately......


Or if you are fortunate enough to find a big ole haul of 'shrooms, you can freeze them like this.....

First drain the water off....


Then flour your mushrooms up real good.....


And put them on a cookie sheet, close but not really touching....


Then put the cookie sheets in the freezer for a couple hours or so, until the mushrooms are frozen hard...


Then pop them off the cookie sheet and put them in bags in the freezer.  When you want to cook them, you just melt the butter in your skillet and then add the frozen 'shrooms and cook like normal!


There are a lot of ways to preserve mushrooms for later use, but this is the best way we've found.  They taste the most like fresh this way in our opinions!

This weekend The Man went 'shrooming every day, and by this evening, we had 3 ice cream buckets of sliced morel mushrooms, which translated into 9 bags of mushrooms in the freezer, plus a nice mess for supper.

 He was hunting over on our aunt and uncle's 100 acre farm, and since it was rainy and nasty, I stayed home to do things around here, so I wasn't a part of this mushroom haul.  The weather is supposed to stay good for mushrooms though, so we'll be headed out next weekend to hopefully find some more!

If you like them, I hope you are finding some in your neck of the woods!

Till next time,

God Bless,


Saturday, April 11, 2015

Just a Walk in the Park.......

So today we went for a walk in the park...............

We were looking for morels.


We saw lots of beautiful things, like this...


And this.....


And this....


We saw beautiful trees reaching up to the sky....


Stretching to meet the blue.....


We saw caves, going deep into the ground....


So many, many beautiful things God has created in this world...


Beauty is everywhere, if we only take the time to look, and even though at the end of the day...

We only found two of these...........


A day spent in the woods with our Maker, is a good day indeed!

Till next time....

God Bless,