Making soap

I had the neatest experience last Friday! I went over to my friend Enola Gay's and we made soap.

I've always wanted to try making soap, but I had it in my head it was this incredible complex and sophisticated process. And indeed it can be. Or...it can be very simple. And basic soapmaking was much much simpler than I thought.

Some basic precautions are necessary: latex gloves to keep the lye off skin (and keep vinegar on hand to neutralize any accidental splashes) and protection over the work surface, such as butcher paper over the table. (This in fact turned out to be critical because we spilled a jar of proto-soap and managed to scoop most of it back up, but the table would have been a mess otherwise.) Do NOT use aluminum pots or utensils (the lye reacts with aluminum). Wooden spoons should be dedicated to soapmaking only - Enola had marked hers with felt tip pens (SOAP and LYE).

The basic ingredients for soap are lye, fat, and water. Beyond this there are infinite variations on the theme: goat milk, scent, fancy oils, etc. I won't give the recipe because every recipe is different, and most libraries have books on soapmaking.

Here's our starting ingredients:



Mix lye and water. Here I'm measuring lye crystals:


Adding water:


Mixing the lye and water:

This is an exothermic reaction (for those who remember their chemistry classes) - it gets hot. Quickly. Place the lye/water mixture to cool in a spot where it won't be disturbed by pets or small children.

We all sat down for tea while the lye cooled.


Mix the fats (in this case we used tallow and coconut oil) and liquefy, either on the stove top or microwave. Here's the liquefied fats and we're testing the temp while still stirring the lye:



Greasing the soap molds with Vaseline. These molds are wood and easy to make for anyone with some basic woodworking tools:



Pouring the cooled lye/water mix into the fats:


One of the secrets to easy soapmaking, I'm told, is to use this nifty little mixer which whirs the soap ingredients up within minutes until the soap "traces." This, I am assured, beats the heck out of the two-hour stovetop stirring method. Enola said these mixers can be found at any store that carries kitchen stuff (Target or a hardware store or whatever).


On the right is my batch, already mixed. On the left, Enola is mixing her batch using the mixer:




Here the soap is starting to "trace" (thicken like pudding, where it holds its shape a bit):



Oops!



Pouring the soap into the molds:


My batch:


Tiffani's batch:


The soap batches were slightly different colors, in part because the ratio of ingredients were not identical, and in part because we added different essential oils (mine was a vanilla/peach, Tiffani's was peppermint).

A few days later, I went over and watched as Sir Knight (Enola's husband) cut the soap. Here's the dried soap with the mold sides removed:


The soap is placed in the cutting mold:


It's hard to see what Sir Knight is using, but he's pushing a frame with taut wires strung across it down through the soap:


Here's the soap, cut:


The individual bars, laid out on newspaper:


I took my bars home, where they will stay laid out flat on butcher paper (if they stayed on newspaper, they might pick up ink stains) to cure. I flip them every day or so. The lye will vent during this time. The earliest I could use the soap would be three weeks, but the longer it cures, the better the soap

Isn't this the coolest thing?

Ding dong, the taxes are done! Let's do UPDATES!

Sorry for the silence folks, but I've been buried in taxes. I had the appointment yesterday, so now all the magic number crunching is in the very capable hands of our tax preparer extraordinaire.

So, since I've been neglecting to post updates on a zillion things, let's get started.

Here's our neighbor's twin calves:




I went over last Sunday and helped dehorn them:


Samantha was not amused. "What have you done to my babies??"


Couple of cute shots of Lydia:



Including eating apple peels:



Here's our Easter calf, Nix:




And Nix's mama, Ebony:

No Easter lamb, but an Easter calf instead

We have another calf! It was a hideous day of weather yesterday, with cold temperatures and screaming wind. Naturally this was the day Ebony, our heifer, decided to give birth to her first calf. None of us were foolish enough to be outside in such nasty weather so I didn't see the calf until long after it was dried off and skittering around. I scooped it up and brought it into the barn, a place Ebony hates to go (we dehorned her last year in the barn and she hasn't set foot inside it since). But in such weather I didn't want to have that poor calf exposed more than it had to be.

Ebony was NOT pleased, but we barricaded her inside whether she liked it or not. I had loaned our camera to someone and won't have it back until this afternoon, after which I'll post photos. Older Daughter named the calf Nix, which in Greek mythology is a goddess of the night (thus continuing our attempt at "black" names since our Dexter calves are black). Nix is a little heifer.

Ebony won't like it, but we'll probably keep her in the barn until Tuesday, when we can dehorn the calf. We use dehorning paste now instead of the more traumatic manual dehorning on an older calf (as we did with Ebony), and the earliest we can dehorn is at three days old.

In contrast to yesterday's hideous weather, today is calm and sunny and beautiful. So there you go - no Easter lamb, but an Easter calf instead. Life on a farm!

Making chicken turnovers

I'd like to introduce you to a most sublime recipe that is absolutely nasty to make.

Well, nasty is probably the wrong term. Sticky works better.

These are chicken turnovers, and it's the crust that's the sticky nasty part. Because of the stickiness involved, I usually triple or quadruple the recipe so I get it all over at once.

Here's the ingredients for the dough:

4 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups margarine (or butter) - not shortening
2 cups (8 oz.) cheddar cheese
2 cups sour cream

[I only had enough sour cream on hand to triple the batch, so that's what I did. I had so much dough that I had to divvy it up into two bowls since I didn't have a single bowl large enough to put all the dough together.]

Combine the flour and salt. Cut in the margarine until mixture resembles coarse crumbs. Stir in the cheese. Add the sour cream. This is where the dough becomes sticky.



Roll it out. Here's where it gets nasty. Be generous in your use of flour to flour the breadboard otherwise the dough sticks. Roll the dough to about 1/4" thickness.



I use a pot lid to cut circular sections. Don't try to roll out all the dough at once - only take a manageable amount at a time.



I pile the sections on cookie sheets. Usually - and I stress usually - there's enough flour on the sections so they don't stick to each other, but there's no guarantee of this. Consider yourself warned.




See? Sticky mess.


Tripling the recipe gave me 37 turnover sections.


Scrubbing the breadboard.


Next comes the filling, which thankfully is much easier:

1 cup chopped celery
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 cup margarine or butter
1/3 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 1/4 cups milk
4 cups cooked cubed chicken
1/4 cup chopped parsley

Saute onion and celery in the margarine. Blend in flour, salt and pepper. Gradually add milk, stirring constantly, until thickened. Add chicken and parsley.

Well, that's the original recipe. But I loathe celery and will never cook with it, and Older Daughter dislikes onions so I don't use them. Instead I flavored the filling with salt, pepper, parsley, sage, and garlic powder. Pick your own favorite spices.

I like to use canned chicken...


...because it shreds so beautifully.


Here's the filling, all cooked up:


Take a third-cup of filling and put it on a dough section:


Fold it over and pinch the edges.


With 37 turnovers, I ran out of cookie sheets and used the table surface.


(Notice Lydia's attentive presence under the table.)


Using every available implement with a flat surface (cookie sheets, pizza pans, griddle, pie pans, etc.), I laid all the turnovers flat and put them in the freezer (except for the ones we had for dinner). Then I had a mountain of dishes to wash.


To cook, bake the turnovers at 450 degrees F for ten minutes, then reduce the temp to 400 degrees and bake another 8 to 10 minutes until golden brown.


After the uncooked turnovers have frozen solid, I layer them in a large (two-gallon) plastic ziplock bag and store them in the freezer. Put waxed paper between the layers (trust me on this).


There are no finer items to have in the freezer for unexpected company. Enjoy!

Livestock shelter

After reading a magazine article called "Bovine Basics for Beginners" in Backwoods Home Magazine, a reader inquired about what a loafing shed (a simple livestock shelter) looks like.

Rather than bogging down everyone's email by sending pix, I decided to post them on my blog.

My husband built this two-stall loafing shed in the fall of 2007 to provide shelter for our two horses when we decided to winter them in a different pasture. As it turned out, it was one of the harshest winters on record with howling wind and tons of snow (which, of course, equals drifts). We were VERY grateful he built the shed.





The back of the shed with the lower roof angle faces the prevailing wind direction, so the animals had shelter from the wind.

Now we winter our animals in a different area so the shed receives very little use. Right now it's in something of a state of disrepair, but it won't be hard to fix up. It backs right up against our garden takes the place of a portion of the fence.