Life Is Good...

Here is a pic of my two mixers side by side. They are beauties, yes? And workhorses to be sure!
But it is a bit amusing to see them together. The Hobart purrs under the load of 6 loaves of bread...it tells me, "I was BORN for this..." while the KitchenAid looks on in awe. But the KitchenAid does chores that the Hobart is just too much of a brute to handle. Like a regular batch of cream cheese icing or Italian Cream Cake batter. I guess REGULAR is the operative word here. There is nothing REGULAR about the Hobart. And I am in love with this machine.
Having the Hobart and now TWO ovens has made my baking days SO much easier. Blessings to my dear husband for making it all happen.

Remember my grass fed calf? A beauty he was. Well, as great looking as he was, he TASTES even better (this sounds a bit wrong somehow, but it is true). John Karger, who raised the calf, asked me to take pics of the meat when I got it to see the marbling and overall quality. When we brought the bounty home from the butcher shop (Thanks, Dutchman's Market!), I took out some New York strip steaks for dinner that night. When I opened the package, I was a bit disappointed. The steaks had little marbling. My first thought was "shoe leather". But I grilled them up and oh my, were they delicious! Here are the steaks prior to cooking:



A week later, I opened a package of hamburger and had the opposite reaction. The meat seemed so fatty! But I patted out the burgers and cooked them up and there was NO fat in the pan! They were quite lean and incredibly delicious...the best beef I have ever consumed. And we have a freezer full! Next week, short ribs!
Early Monday morning, my garden guru, Bernadette Ahrens from Comfort Feed & Garden, is coming up to the house and we're going to butcher my 11 chickens. They are huge and I will be glad to have them in the freezer instead of the chicken coop. Between the remark about the calf and now the chickens, I sound positively ruthless. But really, I am incredibly grateful for these animals feeding us and since we are not giving up meat, I want us to eat clean meat that I know was raised responsibly. So now, after the cow and the chickens, I want to raise a pig this Autumn!