Squash Boats

Ah, summer. 'Tis the season to be so overwhelmed with happy little squash plants that you wind up eating so much zucchini and pattypan squash that you can't even stand to look at it anymore; that is until the seed catalogs come out and you forget that you don't actually need to plant twelve squash plants of each variety because one of each would probably be enough.

And this is how you wind up getting ten precious little pattypan squashes a day. Not to mention the zucchini. Oh sweet Lord in heaven, the zucchini. Don't even get me started on the zucchini. Spoiler alert: everyone I know is gonna get zucchini bread for Christmas. 

But at least the zucchini I can just throw in the food processor, chop it up, and freeze it into what feels like sixty million gallons of ready to go zucchini puree. The pattypan squash though? While squash bread is probably a thing I decided to change it up a little and stuff some awesome squash boats. Hopefully by freezing these little suckers I won't have to eat so much squash that I can't stand to look at it anymore!

Without further ado I give you Lauren's Awesome Squash Boat Recipe (but you can call it your own - no judgement here!):

It's hard to eat just one!

1lb hamburger

1 can corn

1 can stewed tomatoes

1 can tomato sauce (I like hunts)

1 cup brown or wild rice

1 yellow onion, chopped

Four cloves garlic, chopped

Salt and pepper

Six to nine pattypan squashes (generally pick them when they are roughly 5 inches across or the skins get tough), or several large zucchini’s (halved)

1 bag shredded sharp cheddar cheese, if desired

Bring a pot of water to a boil and boil each pattypan for three to five minutes. They will be done when they can be easily pierced with a fork. (If you are using zucchini you can skip the boiling.) 

Scoop out a hollow in your squash to put the filling in, much like carving a pumpkin. You can save some flesh and small seeds to add to the filling if you like, but I throw mine into the food processor to use for squash bread later on down the line. Hey, waste not, want not. Right?

Meanwhile brown the hamburger with the onion and garlic. Salt and pepper to taste. Drain.

Also, meanwhile boil the rice according to package directions. Drain.

Mix the hamburger, rice, corn (drained), stewed tomato (not drained), and tomato sauce together. Let simmer until reduced. I chopped at the tomato chunks with the spoon to make them bite sized.

Fill your hollowed squashes to the brim with the meat mixture and cover with cheese if desired. At this point you can either freeze them for later use or bake them at 400 degrees until the cheese is bubbly and the squash cuts easily with a fork. **Baking time varies greatly depending on the size of your squash, and also how long you boiled it initially. Mine usually take about half an hour.**

Enjoy!

FACT: farm women are like muddy superheroes

A few of my friends have been posting about the “So God Made a Farmer” speech again. It got me thinking, while it is true that the majority of farmers are men where is the love for the women farmers and the farmer’s wives, and daughters? We are out there toiling away in the mud and muck too, ya know.

Seriously ladies. Farm women rock, and anyone that can have patience enough to keep dinner warm until an hour after dark o’clock deserves some accolades. I am convinced that Job has nothing on a farmer’s wife. My own father was late to his wedding because the cows got out, and mom had to wander around the pasture looking for him when her water broke because he was out fixing fence. True story. I was not almost born in a barn. It was definitely the back forty.

A rural life breeds a level of independence, self-reliance, patience, and empowerment that many of my feminist college professors would applaud.

There is just something about those times when you are left alone with all those animals or other responsibilities and Murphy’s law starts rearing its ugly head that makes for empowering moments. Is there a horse stuck under a hay feeder and no one else around? Yes, yes, you can grab two hooves and flip that sucker over so he can stand up before he dies. You've got this. Is the automatic waterer not working? Well, grab a tool kit because no one else is home this weekend and you are gonna find out how intuitive plumbing is whether you want to or not. Scared to death of driving a piece of large machinery? Tough luck buttercup. You’d better buck up, because it is nine o’clock at night and there is hay down and a storm on the way. Learn to drive that tractor on the fly. You are needed. You must rise to the occasion and freakin’ overcome lady.

And when you do? Well, you realize that there literally is no such thing as I can’t. You can do anything. Some things you may not like doing (ahem, mechanical maintenance), and some stuff that is easier with help from others (hello, fence building), but there is NOTHING that you can’t do when you put your mind to it.

That, that, is why farm women are awesome. We may bend to, or break from traditional gender roles; but when push comes to shove we know how to buckle down and just make things happen. I can roll out a made from scratch pie crust and cook a roast whilst washing dishes, and then step outside and perform “guy” jobs like mowing, or operating heavy machinery, or tend the livestock without missing a beat. Because I have had to stretch myself past my comfort zone, and because now I know that I can stretch that way I can't go back. And every farm woman I know can too, because we are amazing strong women and because we aren’t confined to a stereotype. We are, and can be what we want to be, who we are, and we are pushed to become even greater than we thought possible.

So while “God made a farmer”, he also made us. He did a pretty amazing job too, might I add. Pat yourself on the back. Even if you don’t see how awesome you are, someone else does and chances are they are either too intimidated to tell you, or think that you are so mind blowingly on top of this that you don’t need to hear it. But I know better, because I need to hear it too sometimes. For once don’t think of your failings, think of your successes, and feel free to be impressed!

Oh what a beautiful morning!

Good morning all! How are you on this most gorgeous day in the history of summer?

Okay, maybe not the most gorgeous day, but it has to be close. After the past weekend of working outside in above 90 degree temperatures with enough humidity to ensure thrice daily bra changes I am in love with this morning. Sixty degrees and low humidity? Not a cloud in the crystal blue sky? Yes please! Now if only it had happened over a weekend so that I could enjoy it. Oh well, it still made for a fantastic run this morning!

The birds were chirping, the world smelled green, the deer were marauding through the cornfields sounding like Farm-zilla (How creatures that delicate can be that destructive and  LOUD I do not know. Run, run for your lives!), and the wild berries alongside the road were starting to ripen! I can't wait to eat so many that I make myself sick, I mean, pick them for jelly later.

One of my favorite bloggers was making berry puree yesterday. That might be enough inspiration to keep my hands out of the berry bucket. Maybe.

I spent a lot of time last night prepping, filling, and freezing some patty pan squash boats because I have been inundated with pattypan squash and super sized zucchini. (Okay that one is on me. It was hot and I ignored a few of them. My bad. Also, zucchini bread for EVERYONE!) You can expect a lovely recipe post on it tomorrow after I get some good pictures of the finished products. I meant to last night, but it was late and it slipped my mind. It is also almost time for the great tomato canning extravaganza of 2014. Are you ready? Because I'm not, but as the plants begin to ripen and my freezer begins to over flow I am afraid I won't have much of a choice before too long! In related news, if anyone has a kicking marinara sauce recipe I am officially on the hunt.

Take care all! Enjoy the sunshine or the rain!

Hayday.

You know that phrase, “make hay while the sun is shining?” With all of the pop up thunderstorms that we have been having lately this past weekend was one of the first good stretches of haying weather that we have had around here. 

Mother Nature does not seem to care that it was the yearly antique tractor show, or that maybe I would have liked to have not hayed on the holiday, but oh well. Part of the freedom that our founder’s fought for was the ability to own and work this land, and I am immensely grateful for that. Well, and I get to hang out with Captain America for hours at a time (at least until he wises up and makes me rake the dried grass or something!), and bring him lunch and do all those other farm support tasks that I so enjoyed watching my grandma do for my grandpa when I was young. 

Oh, you're going to be mowing all day? Here have a whole roast chicken and a peach pie. Do not argue. That is just how things are done, son.

Despite spending the morning of the fourth in a tractor cab it was a great weekend. I think CA is doing a great job starting his custom haying business. He is probably the only person I have ever met who can look out over a freshly baled field being ruined by a pop up rainstorm and just sigh, shrug, and shake the bales out to dry the next day. Resilience I tell ya. He has it. 

I however have a wide variety of very creative curse words and the sneaking suspicion that Mother Nature is gunning for me, but that is part of the fun. Right? Right? Where would I be without some sort of movie plot in my head?

Anyway, I hope ya’ll had a great fourth! I really can't complain, theatrics aside! It was a fantastic weekend. Well, let’s just say that I’m living in my hayday! ;)

hay·day                /ˈhāˌdā/               noun

noun: hayday; plural noun: haydays

A day dedicated to any of the aspects associated with haying 

(mowing, raking, baling, inevitably fixing the mower-rake-baler, or spent 

crying over the sudden storm cell that just ruined your hay). 

See also, any damn day that it isn’t raining from June until September.

What makes a farmer?

I was talking with one of my friends about a fantasy land where we would run away with our boyfriends and live in a cottage somewhere. In the course of the conversation she started talking about farming and how she wouldn't know what to do with herself, so Captain America and I would have to be in charge of it. I tried to tell her that it was easy, but something must have gotten lost in the translation.

How do you sum up the love, the angst, the freedom, and the responsibility in a few sentences? How do you explain the pure exultant joy that you can feel from successfully doing something that felt insurmountable: mowing and baling a field of hay on your own, helping birth a calf, falling in instant love with a baby chick, making food from dirt? Or the heart wrenching despair and loss that you feel when Murphey's law hits and everything that can possibly go wrong does: all the equipment breaks - repeatedly, it rains on your hay, animals die, gardens wither? 

Surely this is what she must feel like when she tells me about music, or other friends try to explain what moves them. It is so frustrating to have something that you love so much, and be unable to verbalize that love to share it with your loved ones. To explain how easy and wonderful your passion is to someone who doesn't share it is exceedingly difficult.

Being a farmer isn't about mechanical skill, ability to build fence, knowledge of livestock medicine, or any of the hundred other chores that pop in my head - though those things do help. But being a farmer is so much less, and so much more than that. It is heart. It is love. It is fortitude.

Being a farmer is cow paths that wind through the woods as a child's Yellow Brick Road. It is climbing atop a pile of round bales and serenading a herd of cows like you're a pop star. It is watching a thousand loved ones slowly age and die, or be swiftly executed in their prime. It is holding newborn kittens and helping bird's to their nests. It is standing in a hayfield during a surprise thunderstorm surrounded by 200 freshly made square bales that are going to have to be shaken out and dried again so they can be rebaled without molding, and finding the ability to cry, curse and laugh your way through it again and again. It is being aware and entangled with both the highs and the lows of life; and having so much love for that life, plant or animal, that you get up and keep going even when it feels pointless, overwhelming, and you question your sanity.

I don't know. Maybe it is genetic. Somewhere in our DNA is code for red or green tractors next to the one that determines our eye color. Maybe it is environmental. How could I ever leave my adoring herd of fans? After all they are the only ones who like my singing, and most of my songs were about them and the horses anyway. 

Maybe it is a combination of both that gives anyone the determination to pursue their passion. Heart and fortitude, baby. That's what makes me a farmer.

It's a redneck weddin'!

I’m pretty sure that I’m redneck married right now. If the gun left at my house was a betrothal of some sort we are definitely there.

Captain America and I bought a tractor together. It is a brand spanking new New Holland T105 with a passenger seat! He wanted it so he could pull a disc mower and a big baler for his custom haying operation. I wanted it because, well, it has a passenger seat! And air conditioning! And a sun roof! They called it a “high visibility panel,” but it has a sun roof! Long story short, it is a tractor with a cab where I won’t have to plaster myself pathetically to the outside of the door like a squashed bug. Which pretty much sucks except in the spring. I mean why wouldn’t I love clinging to the door with my fingertips as I watch my dad inside the heated, air conditioned, and dry cab. With this beast I can  actually sit in the cab and not get jabbed in the butt by the PTO button or a lever that I have to contort myself around so that my beloved can actually turn on the equipment. Not gonna lie, it’s pretty sweet.

Captain was pretty nervous about it. It is a lot of money up front, but it should be the tractor that we can use for the rest of our lives. Tractors don’t depreciate the way that cars do. Even though it made sense to spend the money now rather than later he was nervous about it. That is until he used the disc mower. I’m pretty sure I have never seen him so happy in all the months we have been together. We messed around mowing his pasture in the five minutes of daylight that we had left when we got back to his place. In those five-ten minutes we mowed almost a quarter of the pasture, which had previously taken him maybe half an hour or forty minutes to mow with his other mower. I hopped out to open the gate and when I turned around he had his arms full of freshly mown clover and weeds and I guess it could have been a trick of the fading light, but I think there were tears of joy in his eyes. He was probably saying something about “Look how great it mows!” but in my head he was spinning and dancing through the meadow with this big armful of clover singing in joy. The clouds parted. He ran towards the tractor, there was a dramatic moment where the refrain of “Loving you is easy because you’re beautiful” was playing. There may have been skipping, but I’m not sure because I was being shown clover at that point and my head and heart were bubbly seeing him so happy.

By the way, my head routinely makes real life into some sort of Disney cartoon. I sincerely doubt that it is a diagnosable condition, but I blame Beauty and The Beast.

So yeah, I’m redneck married. You can send all wedding gifts as checks made out directly to Davis Farm Supply. ;)

I guess all that is left to do is figure out which anniversary is the farm equipment anniversary. Captain America says year one, but I don’t believe him. I feel like he may just be angling for a new baler...

Take me for a ride in your big blue tractor.
We can go slow, or go a little faster.

Life is too short

I stumbled across this on the Facebook page of The Prairie Homestead, and it rang particularly true this morning. I was thinking something pretty similar as I struggled to run fifteen feet farther than yesterday.


How many times do we sit back and lament, waiting for a change; but unwilling to take the necessary steps to make it happen? I know I do it, and I'm sure you do too. I think everyone does in some aspect of their life, whether it is personal or professional: wanting a different kind of love, a different kind of life, or even in my particular early morning experience a different kind of body.


Yeah, how sad is it that for me, it was easier to overhaul my personal relationships and my career than it is to convince myself that I CAN run.


I have never been athletic. I have never thought that I could be athletic. In my brain I have always perceived the girls that ran (or exercised for that matter) for fun as "insane," "crazy," and maybe even "narcissistic." Never have I identified with them. I made up words and descriptions to make it less appealing, to make me feel superior, to validate my never running a consecutive mile in my whole life. To make excuses for not even trying.


I saw images of runners, with their long lean frames and stared at my frumpy self in the mirror chanting: "That can never be me. I don't look like that. Look at my belly, butt, and thighs. The damned things practically bounce off when I jog ten feet. I could never run. I can't do that."


And I never even tried...


Until a month ago.


You may recall a few weeks ago I referenced a conversation that drunk me had with Captain America where I told him my *actual* weight loss goals, and I ended the post with something about lacing up running shoes. Yes. Running shoes. It was a big step. It meant changing everything that I had ingrained in my own head about who I was. Sad as I am to admit it, not running DEFINED me and I didn't even know it until I made a haphazard blog post.


I started running that next morning. I drug myself up an extra hour early and headed out the door. I made it about forty feet before I was heaving and my sight was blurry. I walked the rest of the mile. The next day I made it fifty before I started walking. Susan, my dog with a horrible deviated septum, kept me company. Somehow running next to her as she wheezed like a creeper peeping into a woman's window helped. If she could do it, I could; I can.


The same things kept playing over in my head, day after day. This wasn't me! I didn't run! What was I doing? Who was I kidding? I couldn't do this. I should just go back to bed.


At the end of week two, and a quarter mile of consecutive run time, I actually stopped being wrapped up in my thoughts long enough to realize what my ego was saying to me. I started to argue back. Why couldn't it be me? Why couldn't I be a runner, or fit, or pretty? Why did I have to stay in the comfortable little scholar bowl mold that I had made myself in high school? That wasn't me. I wasn't that limited. I am not that limited. I can be anything. Hell, I already am more than that. Why not add runner to the damned list? Why not?!


Yes. I got pissed off at my own ego tamping me down. And you know what? It felt good.


We all have something that holds us back. Maybe yours isn't changing a deeply held belief about yourself, maybe it is wanting a new type of love, a satisfying career, a new lifestyle, or anything else under the sun; but don't give up on yourself. Don't let that damned voice in your head win. Get pissed. Trust me, you owe it to yourself.


Go out there and get that something you've never had. It feels good to change it up. 


Just not always at six-thirty in the morning after running 3/4 of a mile. That still sucks sometimes. But at seven? Man, it feels great. ;)