A New Recipe with a Dash Update

It's 11 F (-11 C) today and light snow is just starting to fall. Oh look, can you see Dash? He's peeking over the fence to see who's coming out to impose on his day and he's not even wearing his blankie. His mama (the big white girl) is letting him nurse now, after two weeks of spitting him off and generally treating him like an annoying stranger after his illness. I don't know if there's any milk left for him to have, but I don't think it matters. He's done so much better than either the vet or I expected, although he's really small and the weight gain is painfully slow. The gray baby is a full two months younger than he is and has had a growth spurt over Christmas. She makes him look like a squirt.

I just have to post a new recipe that I tried out. I found it in a book called "Soup and Bread", by Crescent Dragonwagon. I thought the author's name was a little strange, but the book is marvelous. With it being the frozen days of winter here, I was glad to find a book dedicated to two of my favorite types of winter foods and without a lot of the odd ingredients that are so fashionable, expensive and hard to find like kombu, daikon, kuzu, mahimahi, seitan, among many others--I don't even know what most of these are and doubt that my family would eat them even if I did. This book offers pure home cooking with some healthy and flavorful twists and I just love it.

My current favorite is called Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup. I had never heard of putting olives in soup before and it sounded intriguing so I took the chance of my family refusing to eat a bite of it and wasting all the good ingredients. Results? Everyone loved it and it's now on our favorite list. I served it with hot baking powder biscuits and cold green salad.

So here is it is for your consideration and use. Enjoy!

Supreme of Chicken and Olive Soup Eureka

4 c. chicken or vegetable stock
1 c. dry white wine
4 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium carrot, peeled and diced
1 rib celery diced
5 tbsp flour
1/2 c. peas
1 1/2 c. milk or half and half
1/2 c. cooked rice
1/4 c. pitted olives cut into fat rounds
1/4 c. pimento stuffed green olives, sliced into fat rounds
3 c. chunked cooked chicken
Salt and fresh ground pepper to taste

1. In a soup pot, combine the chicken stock and wine and boil. Turn down heat and simmer.
2. In a skillet, melt the butter over medium heat. Add the onion and saute until slightly softened. Add the carrot and and celery and saute, stirring, another 5 or 6 minutes.
3. Sprinkle the veg with flour and lower heat. Cook 2 minutes while stirring in the flour. Gradually stir in some of the stock mixture and then whisk in the thickened pan contents to the remainder of the stock. Simmer over very low heat for 20 minutes.
4. Add milk to soup. Add the peas along with the olives, rice, and chicken. Heat through and season to taste.

Pretty simple and basic--mostly just a home made cream of chicken soup. I used 2% milk and left out the peas (because my oldest son won't touch them) and added nearly three times the amount of olives. I also boiled the chicken and used the stock from that rather than purchasing actual chicken stock. Good luck and I hope you like this as much as we did.

Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match

Time for breeding to begin. We've actually been breeding alpacas for several weeks, but some of them are just now starting to show signs of being interested. With alpacas, it's fairly easy to tell if a female is in cycle because she'll lay down (cush) for the male if she is. If she's not in cycle, she'll spit him off and if she's pregnant, she'll really spit at him. The signs of a successful breeding is that a female will flirt, breed and then turn into a witch, when she's around a male, that is. Not really that different from humans, I think. As with most breeding males, they're not at all conscious of what the female wants or doesn't want. They're completely, 100%, absolutely single minded! Did I mention that it's not all that different from humans?

We have several young females that have never been bred before and it's taking them a little time to understand what exactly is going on. We also have two young males that have never bred before and they're so clueless, it's absurd. I'm just not the kind of breeder who will actually
physically involve myself with the details of male and female contact. (Did I say that delicately enough?) I figure that if they don't know how, they're not ready yet.

These are some of our pairings for this year. Both of these pairs have produced beautiful gray offspring and we hope to repeat that. Rose is shown with Roxy, her baby from last year out of Black Knight. We liked the results so much we're repeating that breeding. Solace is our leading black female and we're breeding her again this year to our light rose gray male, Gandalf. They produced a lovely silver gray female born this past spring. Of all my males, Gandalf is the sweetest gentleman. He's kinder and gentler with my females than most of the others. I like him for that. And for the fact that he's just plain handsome.

Rose is a "special" animal. I purchased her from a farm in Spokane, WA and found out after the fact that she suffers with seizures--petit mal and an occasional grand mal. She had never been handled when I got her; born, raised and bred in a large pasture. We've worked with her until she's pretty tolerant of us and actually fairly friendly as long as our interactions are on her terms. We're careful with her feed and her stress levels. We give a year off from breeding about every two or three years and use rescue remedy when we have to shear her or do any shots or foot care. I'll never be able to sell her. Like the lovely grandma goat, Pansy, whose face graces my front page, she'll live out her life here until she dies. Not a bad life for her all in all. She serves her purpose and gives me a pretty baby every year or so and provides the most beautiful rose gray fleece to work with and in return, she lives a stress free life. Sweaters and shawls made from her wool sell for our highest prices. Even if they didn't, I'd keep making them, if only for myself. It's a strange relationship we have, Rose and I, but it works for us. I'm so glad I have her.

As far as goats go, it's Mr. Hermes all the way. He holds the honor of being the one and only proven buck on the farm and has a great track record. He'll only get three of the six females, though. I'm giving one of my older females the year off and sending two out to be bred elsewhere. I'm not telling Hermes anything about that yet. I'm hoping to be able to use his son, Sawyer, in a couple of years with some of the upcoming kids from the outside buck. Don't they just look like "Me and Mini Me"?