A winter day in the farmhouse + our family's special news

thanks to kiwico for sponsoring today's video more about them later it is a rainy muddy messy nasty all of those adjectives stay here on our farm which has pretty much described all of February and all that's in the 10-day forecast I'm not really complaining because this has also meant that it's been really warm which means that we're able to spend tons of time outside even a few days we've had the window open which is great in the kitchen while I'm cooking getting to air things out we're doing morning chores and then I'm gonna head inside for some breakfast prep foreign [Music] if you were following along last fall you might remember whenever I was freeze drying so many eggs because we were getting way more than we could handle well then I ended up going through my first trimester so yes I am expecting another baby this summer we're expecting another baby we're very excited about it I was able to get through some of the freeze-dried eggs but there were times when I just needed to make something really quick and not reconstitute powdered eggs truly they are not gross they are totally fine but if you've been pregnant you understand so now that I am well past that first trimester I told my kids I am not buying any eggs even if you want a fresh fried egg with the yolk intact I'm not doing it until we are through every last bit of the preserved eggs now lucky for them the chickens are starting to lay again so we actually are getting a half a dozen or so eggs a day for those fresh eggs but this still means that I need to use up a lot of freeze-dried eggs and we still aren't getting enough for our family so it's working out one of my favorite things to make that I've been making over and over again is an EIN corn Dutch baby or a Sourdough Dutch baby it's great because I can use freeze-dried eggs but then I can also reconstitute the eggs with milk instead of water so it ends up being a very protein Rich concoction I have the recipe over on the blog I double it so I end up doing three cups of iron corn flour two cups of the freeze-dried eggs which ends up being a little more than a dozen it's supposed to be a dozen eggs but I just do two cups because I'm really trying to get rid of them and then I do two cups of milk to reconstitute the eggs and then another two cups of milk just for the recipe half a teaspoon of salt two teaspoons of vanilla a quarter cup of sugar or honey then I preheat a cast iron skillet on the stove with some butter add the mixture to two large cast iron skillets because I double it put it in the oven until it's poofy at about 425 degrees something like that and we just been eating this over and over sometimes we make a berry syrup like we did today with strawberries and honey and then sometimes we just do syrup it's so good now I am restocking my basket of eggs oh I miss this so much it's a beautiful colorful addition to our kitchen that I missed all winter I brought out a small basket and realized I need a larger basket because we are actually getting enough eggs now to put them back out I cannot wait until there's a bouquet of flowers next to it from the garden [Music] I want to tell you a little bit about something that my kids love doing especially in the winter they get super excited about it year round but for me as a parent it's very nice to have something else on especially rainy messy days like today that the kids can work on kiwico is a monthly subscription box that makes really fun Hands-On educational projects for kids we've been enjoying them for years now I love them for a few reasons one is that everything comes in the crate so I don't need to run to the store and get additional items it's something that challenges them yet they can complete themselves our oldest daughter Ruth had the Eureka crate which teaches kids and kids at heart because it's for ages 12 all the way up to 104 plus any age older than 12. how to apply principles of Science and Math to engineer Solutions and make awesome things they'll love and use every day she made this lock box that that has a little key I actually didn't even watch her put it together it's something that she worked on for quite a while by herself I love that the crates always teach something they come with kid friendly instructions and oftentimes an educational magazine so for example the atlas crate which our son Jude worked on is for ages 6 through 11. it teaches kids about somewhere in the world something about their culture a recipe there's usually multiple projects that go with each crate today we learned about Japan a lot of times even though it's for specific ages like the atlas crate works best for six to eleven most of the kids like to get in on it and read all of the material and learn something from it too Theo who's 15 months enjoyed the panda crate it helps babies learn by playing exploring interacting with adults in their lives or older siblings our kids love playing with these with the younger kids too Daniel had such a fun time with the koala crate he had a camping theme this time so we got to make a little fire and pretend to roast marshmallows I love that they learn something but they all just think it is the most fun I think the kid who got the most excited about it was the nine-year-old who had the Tinker crate he got to make a little contraption that sets up dominoes and he's still playing with it every day it was really fun to make but then also to continue playing with and it taught him something about science the mechanics of something like that so if you want to try kiwiko out and support my channel you can click the link in the description box below to get 50 off your first month the link is kiwico.com forward slash Farmhouse YT again visit that link and use the code Farmhouse to get 50 off your first month today for lunch we are going to do leftovers sometimes I get to this point where we have a whole bunch of little things I have some bread that I sourdough bread that's been sitting in the fridge for probably a week now which I prefer to bake the bread fresh so if we end up not getting to it I'll just leave it in there until I'm ready to bake it even if I fermented it already a while ago this is also the way that whatever I make bread ahead of time I'll make like five or six Loaves and then we just will bake it all throughout the week so if you want to batch make bread once for a week of bread you can do it as I am filming this it is Valentine's Day I know it's past Valentine's Day now but I didn't have any big plans for Valentine's Day I can't really say that I ever totally do but I have some kids who want to make sure that there are plans or at least something a little bit special for Valentine's Day and so I usually will let them do a little bit of experiment Johanna requested that last time I got groceries that I got some strawberries and some chocolate because she really wanted to make chocolate dipped strawberries so after feeding the starter she is getting some boiling water on the stove to do a little bit of a double boiler situation here with the bowl and the chocolate so that she can dip some strawberries and then I'm going to make some barbecue sauce to finish off that container of pork that I pulled out of the fridge so I've told you guys a million times that I need to get a whole bunch more meat but I have to work through all the cuts that I don't love and so I cooked a couple of big country style ribs a few days ago it makes not as tender of a meat as ribs does the country style it's more like pork choppy if you will so it's not exactly our favorite but it does taste better with some barbecue sauce we've been eating on this for a while now we are finally ready to finish it off but I don't have any more barbecue Q sauce so I did a mixture of some ketchup Worcestershire sauce honey brown sugar and vinegar and I'm going to smother the pork in that throw it in the oven in the glass dish I had some leftover mac and cheese from the first time we ate this pork because I'm just trying to serve it barbecue style so people like it I have some jalapeno cheddar sourdough as I mentioned which again it's been fermenting a little too long but it is definitely still edible and it will smooth over the pork situation along with the mac and cheese come on we can we can eat not our favorite meat when we're also having mac and cheese for the mac and cheese I will just cook up some organic noodles pasta noodles they're not homemade they're just purchased I try to keep a lot of those and add in shredded cheddar milk butter sometimes I add in a few more ingredients like nutmeg and mustard but sometimes I just keep it really basic stir those ingredients together and the kids always love it of course Salt as well now I need to go out and fill my 9 by 13 dish again with meat this way I can keep working through those cuts I'm pulling out deer ribs beef ribs if you've ever ordered a whole beef or you've gone hunting you might know that ribs that aren't from pork are not very good there's not a ton of meat on them so I don't love to cook them but I figured if I throw in several packs at once then pull it from the bone it'll be almost like a roast so today when I'm editing this video I actually have all of that meat in the oven since about 8 A.M this morning on 300 degrees with some broth and Seasonings later after I get done with this I'm gonna go in let it cool and then I'm gonna pick all all the little bits of meat from the bone because that's the problem with ribs from beef and deer is there's just not that much meat I'm going to smooth it over yet again by adding it over some organic chips with shredded cheddar and make it into nachos so we'll cover it with sour cream and salsa I think everybody's going to be completely fine with it even though if you're just getting like a piece of deer rib and tearing into it it's really not that delicious okay I'm not picky but it's just not my favorite thing but we don't waste food around here we find ways to use it as I was blabbing about undesirable meat cuts did you see me pull the most delicious linen out of the dryer I pre-washed and dried this gorgeous linen that I found on Etsy I have been in the market for a fabric to redress the windows again adding some more color we did repaint the cabinets and I plan to share a whole kitchen update video I have a few few more things I want to do I have some paint I want to put on one of the walls or a couple of the walls rather we have a new vinyl mat under the kitchen table I have some art and something else I wanted to do what for this little makeover was so some new pinch pleat curtains took me a while to find the right fabric but I really think that this one does the trick I was going for something that had a little color that had a country Vibe not too country not too modern it's a really weird balance with my style as I'm sure it is for most people you get the idea of kind of what you're going for and sometimes it's a bit tricky to achieve it but this fabric I'm really loving I started by measuring the curtains that I already have up there because I do like the link the cafe curtain halfway up length and then I just folded the fabric in half to visualize how wide it would be and what that would mean for the pleats so I wasn't really putting the pleats in the right spots I was just more making sure how how many pleats I could put in and spoiler alert I end up still putting in too many pleats and taking a few out I decided on five pleats that was the right width for this so first I am taking the ends that will be the top and the bottom of the curtains pressing them over a quarter inch and then an additional three and a half inches I wanted a nice wide hem on the top and the bottom so that I could have the pleats be within that bulky fabric to create a bit more of a of a pleat so that there'd be a lot of weight there I have two layers of fabric instead of just one and then I also just for a more finished look wanted the same thing for the bottom then I go over to my sewing machine I'm just hemming the sides I don't usually press whenever it's just a simple quarter inch quarter inch like this one is just a quarter inch over twice to hide the rod inside I don't usually press that I just eyeball it because it is so easy for me to eyeball especially with a checkered fabric like this because I can just do like two checks over and two checks over that then after the sides I do the tops which I did measure and press because I wanted something so specific like three and a half inches and I wanted to make sure after I pressed it that it was the right length which I was going for a finished curtain length of 27 inches so now I have two sides hemmed at a quarter inch and then I have the three and a half inch on the top and bottom so I had to add a total of eight inches to the length because I have the half inch over for the raw Edge and another three and a half inches on the top and the bottom so times two so for a total of eight inches now I am deciding pleat placement the way to do this no matter what size of curtain you're doing is to start with the middle and then think about how many pleats you want and then dividing it like that so if you're doing five or seven it's really easy to do the two outsides which I didn't go all the way to the outside with the pleat I went two inches in the middle and then fold the fabric from the outside pleats to the middle to find the halfway point between the middle and the outside pleat that's for five now if you're doing seven again you divide it in thirds by doing the two outsides in the middle and then you divide it in two in between those to create a total of seven I find that it's a little bit easier with odds probably so much so that I would just make it odd even if I didn't want to now originally like I said I did seven pleats I hung it up and realized no that's a little bit too pleated so I pulled out a few of them I was able to leave the two sides in the middles and this was just on one I only hung one curtain at a time so that I could be sure I liked it so I only had to take out like two pleats and then put back into but they're so so easy because essentially what you do especially with checked fabric is I did two checks for each inside and then two checks on the outside so basically it's double folded with two checks on each outside I think you can see what I'm talking about here in the video it's kind of hard to describe and then I just sewed around it like a little rectangle all the way to the bottom and out to really Define that pleat and then all the way back to the top I swear with sewing projects it is so difficult to explain what I'm doing that's why I try to create a lot of visual aids I think if you are a sewer you can see exactly what I'm doing here it's a very very simple project this is something you could do in any room it was fast I got it done both of these done in an afternoon a cloudy afternoon I might add so it's kind of hard to see but it was so simple and I love how it turned out so much so that I'd really like to put some pinch pleats and some other rooms in our home like maybe the bathrooms would look nice with a couple of pinch Plate Cafe curtains you might remember I did an Ikea Hack video a year or two ago where I pleated the top of those curtains and I used pleater tape that's another option but I didn't want so much bulk I like these to be these Breezy linen curtains for these Cafe curtains and I felt that adding the pleater tape although take all the guesswork out of it would be just too bulky whereas in the living room I was going with a more formal look I definitely was going for casual in this space this actually was so easy I was surprised at I just kind of looked up some pictures of some of the curtains I liked and then it was just really easy to figure out how to replicate them in my own home now we are making heart-shaped pizzas again this was a child's idea but it's really easy because we're just doing the sourdough starter pizza crust which means that we put a pizza stone or a cast iron skillet or both or many of those depending on how many kids or people you have cooking for preheat them in the oven at 500 degrees spread it with sourdough starter or sourdough discard it doesn't have to necessarily be fed ours was and I just put it in a heart shape added some olive oil spices and salt baked it until it was crunchy and then put on the sauce and the cheese and then we even did some heart-shaped pepperonis now they're not really pepperonis we had some salami and a couple of kids took them and cut them out into Hearts to make these very fun and festive Valentine's Day pizzas I hope that you enjoyed going along with me on this winter day if you are curious about any of the recipes mentioned in this video make sure you head to pharmac.com and the search bar you can put in sourdough pizza crust jalapeno cheddar sourdough bread Pine corn Dutch baby pancake I'll also leave links below as always thank you so much for stopping by our farmhouse [Music]

Channel: Farmhouse on Boone

Views: 139,056

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Id: b7iNJbD_wHg

Length: 17min 39sec (1059 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023