Missing Willow Farm

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  Fried alligator!  My parents are friends with a nuisance gator hunter in Florida.  When I was down there recently, he hooked me up with some gator meat.  After much research, I cut the meat into chunks and soaked it in a mixture of 2 cups of buttermilk and a tablespoon of Tabasco.  The breading was a mixture of flour, cornmeal, garlic powder, salt and pepper.  The marinated chunks got shaken in a paper bag then straight into the Fry Daddy for just 3 minutes.  I made a remoulade sauce and a lemon dill yogurt sauce.  AIEEE it was good!

Let’s hear it for the red, white and blue!  Happy fourth everyone.  🙂

Our two little hives are going gangbusters this year.  We’ve harvested twice and will need to harvest one or two more times this summer.  It’s an exhausting, sticky process.  We don’t have a honey house so we extract in our kitchen with newspapers on the counters and towels on the floor.  The trickiest part is getting the honey frames in the house without any bees tagging along.

Jack has been helping us harvest potatoes.  Sort of.  This batch got a REALLY good scrubbing when we were done.  He’s fascinated with sweet potatoes.  He ran off with one last fall on harvest day and made it his toy.

I received this gorgeous blue strawberry planter for Mother’s Day a few years ago.  I tried immediately to plant strawberries in it with very poor results.  All but one of the plants died.  It’s become my herb garden and is very accessible to the kitchen.  We got one strawberry this spring from the one plant that survived. We split it.  🙂

With the deck do-over this year we decided not to bring the 70 or so potted tomato plants to the back deck that we normally do.  Those are down by the raised beds.  We did, however, bring the cucumbers up.  I wish I’d planted more of them, dang it.

Broccoli!  We just harvested our first little bit.  We didn’t grow a lot this year but what we’ve got looks really good.

We keep the pond in our front yard stocked with fish.  My parents came for a visit and my dad (isn’t he handsome?) caught a mess of croppie.  I made fish tacos for dinner.  Fried croppie, shredded red cabbage, chipotle sour cream and monterey jack cheese in a soft flour taco.  Yum!

 

Summer has arrived and things are starting to ripen.  Multiple varieties of cucumbers, tomatoes (yay!), potatoes and garlic are on the dinner menu.

While working with our sheep, one of them knocked me on my rear into a pile of poop.  Thankfully, I own more than one pair of overalls.  Summer is in her usual spot.