We raise Pilgrim Geese, they dont like water much, which is great on our little parched farm, they have a plastic wading pool to bathe in. They are the greatest parents, goslings in spring are collectively raised by the aunties, mom, and dad. We sell young geese, but keep the best one for the Holidays.My 100th recipe in here is dedicated to the Holiday Goose. Home butchered mid December, hung 6 days in a cold barn, aged till tender. Humanely raised, no artificial anything except de-wormer, Ivermectin, as one in three wild geese have worms. The down and feathers make a great pillow. The wing feathers make dusters.I make foie gras pate from the liver. Geese fatten themselves up just before winter migration, double the size of their livers, and when they finish migration six weeks later, their livers are normal size again. No forced feeding.I smoke the leg meat and serve that as jerkey. The carcass and organs make the best goose broth stock for soups and gravies. The goose skin is very flavorful, mixed with goosefat, it makes a delicacy the french call rilettes, a sandwich spread. The center piece for the holiday dinner are the breasts. I serve them with roasted pecans, baked apples and roasted fingerling potatoes.

Keep the eggshells whole for making these gourmet scrambled eggs and refill the shells with the gourmet scrambled egg mix, a fun and special way to serve Easter Eggs.#CA2025

Our plums are starting to ripen, and all at once. Here is how we process the ones we dont eat directly from the tree or give away. We added a Japanese plum wine recipe here and published a separate recipe for Amish plum wine.You can grow plum trees from ripe pits: scrub the pits, put in bowl of water, discard the floating ones, plant three pits in one planter hole in a large cloth planter pot with handles or in a planter bed in a sunny location.Plant in fall, they need winter cold to germinate. They will sprout in spring. Select the most vigorous one, remove other two.Drag planter pot around till you find a sunny location where the young plum tree flourishes.#GlobalApron

Raw Edible chestnuts mold easily and are all ripe at the same time, so we dry boil them to preserve in mason jars for year round use, an old french method.Another year round use is a home made chestnut amber liqueur.For fresh use, we cook them, make a delicious roasted chestnut cream soup with chestnut mushrooms and celeriac root, and puree them to make a chestnut spread for sandwiches, which keeps a week in the fridge. Here are the recipes.This also shows you how to do a float test in a bucket of water, pick the four best and biggest chestnuts for planting, store them in the fridge for planting till spring, and grow beautiful trees for decoration, shade and bountiful annual harvests.

Here is how we test for Grade AA freshness of our eggs, and preserve eggs year round. You might want to use the same test and preservation at home. Our giant Australorb free range chickens lay one egg each every other day, one yoke or two yoke, except winter time, they might skip up to sixty days.I keep them free range, safe in the coop overnight and mornings to lay eggs in the nesting boxes. Some however, will wait till they are let free to range in the afternoon and try to lay and hide their eggs in spring to brood and have baby chicks. So I test every egg when I find it.

Before the first night frost comes in November, time to process all the garden tomatoes, ripe or not. A pound of tomatoes make a pint of puree. A tablespoon of apple cider vinegar per pint keeps botulism out. The green tomatoes take longer to peel, then are cored, roasted, pureed and simmered. The red hard ones and red ripe soft ones are peeled, cored, pureed, then roasted and simmered. The over ripe ones are washed, quartered and sundried and stored in olive oil. We expect the next tomato harvest in June, 32 weeks from now, so I freeze 64 pints of puree, the basis for tomato soup, tomato sauces, tomato paste, salsa verde, and ketchup. They take little space in the freezer when stored in quart bags laid flat and frozen.

Our chickens are laying lots of eggs this time of year, but in another month, they stop laying till days get longer again. We coat their egg shells with soy bean oil so they stay fresh one more month, but then have to wait for eggs till hens start laying again.You dont have to wait. You can pickle eggs in the shell without peeling. See recipe below.Pickled eggs bridge the eggless winter period and are great in winter salads. They stay fresh for two months. The red beet colored eggs brighten salads, the yellow eggs spice up curries, the brown soy sauce eggs complement asian dishes.#GlobalApron

Granny Smith apples are our horses’ favorite apples, and ours. They stay fresh a long time, dry well, make good apple sauce, great apple strudel, apple pie, apple donuts, apple beignets and apple “flaps”. The Granny Smith apples we use are medium size apples, 3 apples per pound. One to two apple trees produce several hundred apples, enough for all recipes below.

Geese gorge themselves in the wild before their annual migration till their livers have doubled with fat, then migrate, and six weeks later, their livers are back to normal. Hunters called these geese foie gras geese. Their livers weigh over 200 grams just before migration, half a pound. Normally, goose livers are around 100 grams.We do not support commercial force feeding of geese to expand their livers multifold, but use naturally fattened livers to make goose liver fois gras pate.With a store bought frozen goose, look at the date of processing and buy a winter goose.We fatten and butcher a farm goose once a year in winter. Our geese dont migrate, they are Farm geese called Lincoln Geese.Here is the recipe for this delicacy, natural goose liver pate foie gras.

I do not cut our dead roses from our rose bushes in the fall, they develop rose hip fruits. Great for making rose hip tea, rose hip syrup and rose hip jam.Rosehips turn dark when drying in the sun, like raisins.Three 8 foot high climbing Californica rose bushes and one climbing Rosa Rugosa bush produce about three pounds of dried rose hips annually. The birds in the garden collect the difficult to get to hips when ripe, I pick the easy ones. You can also order dried rosehips on Amazon to make your own tea.

We grow Meyer lemons: they are big, juicy, tasty and frost resistant. They are ripe in February. Here is how we preserve and use them till next year’s harvest. All parts of the lemon are used: zest, peel, flesh, juice. 70 meyer lemons cover us for a year, they weigh over half a pound each. The potted tree produces between 50 and a 100.

The one time that the chicken and the egg both come first! Two egg omelette that turns an omelette from weekday breakfast to weekend dinner special.