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Time for a break….
….the beef and pork has been sent on its way….the cows are all on fresh pasture…so it’s time for a break. For the next few weeks we’ll be visiting Devon friends here and in England. First stop: the annual Devon meeting near Cooperstown, NY and I do hope to find time to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame. From New York, we catch a plane to England and drive straight to Wales for five days. A beautiful country we’ve only touched before. Then, our annual renewal: two weeks with our good friends in Devon and Cornwall…looking at cows, talking about cows, but drinking very little milk. Again, we’ll have our…
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Sure hope this doesn’t jinx it but….
….wrapped up my annual physical yesterday and got a clean bill of health. Well, as clean as it can for someone closing in on his 78th birthday. The doctor is very aware of our interest in grass fed beef and so he’s been tracking certain indicators very carefully. One, my cholesterol levels, has come down from dangerously high levels five years ago to where it is now firmly in the normal range. More interesting is a new test he used for the first time: a kind of ultra-sound of the arteries in the neck. The test reveals the condition not only of the arteries but the heart and can be…
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Whatever happened to the Farm Bill?
Well, unfortunately, it’s alive and well in Congress. But at least one Senator is getting impatient with the delay and wants it passed now. We’ve made our own view clear: this is a trillion-dollar boondoggle (sweetened with the Food Stamp program to garner votes) that would be a good place to start if either party was really serious about cutting spending. Here’s a link to a pretty good summary of what the bill contains: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/316531/reminder-how-bad-farm-bill-veronique-de-rugy
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From the chef’s corner….
Thistle Hill Farm communicates with its friends, neighbors and customers (generally everyone falls in all three groups) not only with this website and blog, but with Facebook and an occasional newsletter to those who ask to be put on our mailing list to be told when beef and pork is about to become available. The other day, our daughter-in-law, Barbara, cooked a roast for her family using Thistle Hill beef, of course. It was a big success and she emailed us the recipe and we shared it with our meat customers. The recipe provoked quite a bit of interest so we thought we’d bring it over to our Blog. As you…
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Planning ahead…
…a few months back we initiated a sign-up program for our neighbors who wanted to reserve grass fed beef and pastured pork. That seems to have worked well, with most people finding it convenient to program their freezer supplies to make room for our meat packs. The final steer in that series will be coming out in just a few days and, as always, all the shares have been spoken for. Excuse me, Miss Ady. * But this program also helps us schedule our steers for market and right now we are looking at beef being available in the middle of October, November and December. Again we’ll be selling halves, quarters and…
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How could we resist?
Well, we couldn’t. So here’s our new puppy. Another English Shepherd from Oklahoma. We still tear up over “Pokey” but we thought this little girl might help. She’s from the same breeder and in fact has some of the same bloodlines. We expect the stork (aka: American Airlines) to deliver her to us about the first of October, right after we get back from our next trip to Devon. No name yet and perhaps you would like to help with that. The family survey has Bonnie, Jasmine (Jazz), Misty, Cimmarron, Okey-Dokey pretty much tied for first place. At the family cookout yesterday, great-grandson Rowan had so many cookies in his…