Building community through food

There are some exciting changes afoot around the King household.

I (Sarah) am going to be launching  a new portion to this site and making some upgrades. Its time to remodel a bit and make room for yet another new item on our current menu. I’ll be explaining more with in my first post on the new page: For the Sake of Good Food.

Just in case you thought that Bubba and I would be winding down for the year and settling in for a long winter’s nap- we’re just getting started.

Thanks for taking the time to stop by, its all of you who make it the fun worth having.

Many hands make light work

Bubba speaks about pigs

As most of you now know I have started raising pigs, not just to look at but to eat. I know it sounds crazy, and I will admit that I listen to myself talk about it and I wonder about my sanity.

The most common questions I get from people are how are you raising them (and where)? And, why are you doing this?

The easy one to answer is the how. I wanted to get a heritage type breed, not just a run of the mill Yorkshire or Hampshire which is the standard breed you would find on your grocery store meat aisle. I did come across a guy who had a certain kind called a Whooly Pig but he wanted me to buy 30 pigs because I hand 300 square feet and a pig only needs 10 square feet to live, but that goes against all that I wanted to do, we will come back to that part. I went on the hunt again for some locally bred heritage pigs.

I spent a few months looking not only for pigs to raise, but also the best possible place to raise them. I had set up getting food from The Allison, a new resort close to my house. After a lot of looking I finally found the folks at Heritage Farms Northwest in Dallas Oregon, about 30 miles from my home who would sell me a couple of Red Wattle piglets. The good news was I was happy with what I found, the bad news was still no home.

I put the word out to everybody I knew in Newberg that I was looking for somebody who would be willing to host some pig on their property. A week later The Amazing Judy Hatcher, my mother-in-law’s co-worker said she had the perfect place and the best part, there was almost no work to put into this place because she had already kept pigs there a few years back. And like that I was in business.

Come the first part of March I will fed, raised and butchered my own pork for the family table. I may never want to kill a pig again, but I can say that I did it. If you happen to be up early in the morning and driving about Newberg, you might see me hauling yesterday’s scrap from the kitchen to my next meal in the pasture.

Thanks to the staff at The Jory Restaurant for making this possible!

 

Breakfast is coming! Wait, maybe I'm breakfast?!

 

 

Bubba the Pig Farmer

 

 

Chow Time!

 

Sweet Success

Last year you might recall that Bubba decided to take up beekeeping. Ya know, just something to do in all of our spare time. I was pretty sure that Bubba had fallen and hit his head the day he came home and asked my opinion on keeping bees. He actually wanted to take a class (because they have such things) about how to keep bees and at the end of the class he would be on official bee keeper and be in a bee keeping club (no kidding). My response amounted to, “Sure why not? This is your project, I’m not going to get involved in this one.” And so Bubba went on his merry way to school one day to learn about bee-friending (sorry couldn’t help it). You might remember some of our postings with photos of progress in building a collection of hives and some of the surprises along the way.

Last week Bubba got his sweet reward: Nearly 4.5 gallons of honey were extracted from our two supers this year, enough to give us a few cavities and share with Mike and Katherine (our bee buddies). We also had to leave enough honey behind in the hives for the bees to eat through winter and the first part of spring when things start to bloom again. So how does one, “harvest” honey? Well, we went a little old school. Below are some photos of the extraction process, done using a hand crank extractor where the frames filled with honey are placed in a drum and the honey is spun out of the honeycomb using centrifugal force. The honey then settles to the bottom of the drum where it is poured out into jars and can be stored in the pantry for many months to come (or at least as long as we can keep our fingers out of it).

We are very excited about this highly successful project. We weren’t expecting to get any honey for our own consumption in year one, we thought we would only get enough to keep the bees fed through winter. We were so glad they decided to share. Thanks to Mike and Katherine for being awesome bee buddies- we’re excited to do it all over again next year!

*Keeping bees isn’t for the novice. Honey bees live in swarms of approximately 10,000 and while they sting (just ask Bubba) they are vulnerable to predators and need protection but also get sick. For some current information about the honey bee crisis go here. If you want to bee cool like us and keep bees too, talk to Katherine and Bubba, they’ll get you in touch with the right people who can help get you started.

Honey Extractor

Liquid Gold!

Thanks bees!

Kinsale:

So we arrived in Kinsale on Sunday (8/8) afternoon and it immediately reminded me of the island of Paros, Greece. It took us a couple of hours to drive out of the city on Sunday but once we starting to head into farm country we were able to relax those white knuckles (referenced below) and enjoy the country side. Ireland countryside belongs on a postcard, every part of it, and Kinsale is no exception. Kinsale is a small port town, south of Cork. There seems to be families from all over the world enjoying vacation here at the moment, we had breakfast this morning and heard French and tonight at dinner we heard Israli- we’ve also heard Dutch, German, English (Brits), Spain-ish Spanish, and Gaeltic, oh and Irish. Kinsale is the Cannon Beach of Ireland we’ve decided and for those of you who have been to Cannon Beach, you know exactly what I’m talking about, though in the place of every terrible trinket shop there is a pub, and significantly more food options. We rented a house here for a few days to enjoy this lovely town and spend some down time before the family arrives and we meet up with them on Wednesday in Rosslare.

This is how we started our mornings in Kinsale

Bubba pondering with his pipe.

Wait to be seated here.

Snack time!

Learning to Drive

I’m happy to report that I was able to recover my notes from our trip with blog posts in progress- I’ll be posting them and filling in where I left off, even though its already been a month since we’ve been home.

Bubba’s experiences with driving on the “wrong” side of the road:
- Bubba swore several times, often trying to imitate an Irish accent
- We hit the left shoulder more than once, luckily the rental car that we received is completely scuffed up on the left hand side so some other dumb American’s before us already took care of the job,
- White knuckles are still present
- Do as your mother taught you and look BOTH ways before entering traffic and trying to cross the street (on foot or by car)
- The yellow ones don’t stop.
- Round-a-bouts in foreign countries make a lot of sense to everyone who isn’t American. We once again tried to take a concept that works just find in other countries an apply it ourselves with different rules because we think WE ARE BETTER THAN THAT.
- A victory beer is well earned after driving on 6 national motorways, toll roads and regional highways.

Maps- they really are a wonderful thing. Despite the fact that I still get my left and rights mixed up (all the time) my internal compass really does quite well especially in foreign countries. While Bubba was busy keeping his eyes glued to the road I usually find myself in the passenger seat, revising our route, investigating alternatives and consulting our guidebooks so our routes intersect into something fun to see or do. We often have more fun picking out alternative routes and pulling over to take photos or stop in for a nip to the loo because we have no set destination or time requirements.