We hope you enjoy our farm stories, tips, recipes and more!
It can be intimidating to cook with grass-fed beef, I’ve been there! Grass-fed beef tends to be leaner than other beef you may have cooked, but not to worry, it just needs to be prepped and cooked a little differently to ensure a delicious final product!
Read more to learn about our friends at Piney Woods Farm, who we currently partner with to provide y’all with beef until we have our own and learn some of our favorite cooking tips!
There’s nothing like a hot bowl of nourishing chicken soup on a chilly evening or when you’re feeling a little under the weather. Fresh veggies, rich broth, yummy spices….delicious!
I usually make my chicken soup using a whole chicken BUT this past week, I made it using our chicken backs & necks. They come in a pack of 2 and it’s basically the frame left after the boneless skinless breasts, legs & wings are cut out. Still a good bit of meat (about 1-1.5 cups shredded) and bones to make yummy soup. Plus a two pack of backs & necks is only about half the cost of a chicken.
This meal serves about 8-10 people, but only costs about $14 to make!
I gotta admit, there were a lot of pork cuts I was unfamiliar with or unsure how to prepare. However, we are really finding value in making sure nothing goes to waste and learning how to use the whole animal, organ meat and all.
Not only is purchasing pork in bulk cost effective, it’s also reassuring to know that you’ve got a stocked freezer that you can shop out of weekly. Plus, you know how the animal is raised and you have that connection to your farmer.
In this blog, we will walk you through what comes in a half pig and some simple ideas for how to prepare each cut. We hope you enjoy!
I remember my college years. Freshman year, you get a meal plan and it’s all you can eat….three meals a day. Well, as you can imagine, I had to start watching what I ate, along with lots of my friends and classmates.
The extent of my “health foods” knowledge at the time consisted of portion control, lots of vegetables, and everything must be low-fat. Yogurt, milk, ice cream, cereal, granola bars, you name it, I always chose low-fat. That’s what our culture communicated to me was healthy. There’s even low-fat half & half?! So something that literally means half milk, half cream (which is fat!) has NO fat at all in it?! It’s basically milk mixed with additives to thicken it like corn syrup, no thank you!
After starting the farm, we began to really explore what we were eating and what’s actually good and nourishing for our bodies. We discovered that fat is actually not a bad thing, but something our body needs. And the best fats are the ones that are not processed and come from natural sources such as animals, especially those raised in their natural environments.
It has been such a privilege over the last several weeks to get to share our pork with our customers. We’ve gotten such good feedback and we are stoked that y’all are loving it!
One of our favorite pork products is our sausage. It’s so versatile and I love how you can use the various flavors of our sausages to spice up lots of meals in a unique way.
I wanted to take some time to walk thru each sausage type that we currently offer along with some fun meal ideas for each and hopefully inspire some excitement in you to go whip up some yummy food!
Y’all, I gotta admit…..I wasn’t too keen on the taste of livers. I think at first it was a mental thing, but honestly, I still wasn’t a huge fan.
I really wanted to like them though!
Mostly because chicken livers have so many health benefits which I dig a little deeper into in this blog, in addition to a wonderful recipe for people new to cooking with chicken livers. Enjoy!
Food labels are downright confusing and can often even be misleading. What do you think eggs from “free range” chickens means?
Chickens frolicking through green pasture all day long?! At least that’s what the picture on some egg carton shows, but that may not be the reality.
There are so many options at the store: Free-range, Cage-free, Omega-3 Enriched, Organic, Vegetarian Fed, etc.
If you’re like I was just a few years ago, you just get overwhelmed and choose the first carton you find without a broken egg or the one with the prettiest picture, ha!
Let’s dig into what all the labels actually mean…
Are you ever intimidated by leg quarters?! It’s much easier to think about cooking up a pack of thighs, right? Well, leg quarters are even better in my opinion, because you get BOTH the drumsticks and the thigh…plus they’re super easy to separate if you prefer to do that.
I’ll be walking you through one of my favorite recipes below, along with a quick how-to for separating your leg quarters. They do tend to cook a little faster separated!
Have you ever thought, "What's the big deal about bone broth"?
Or maybe "Bone broth is nice and all, but it's SO hard to make!"
Or "Isn't it just the same thing as regular broth or stock"?
I had these same thoughts until I made my own. Turns out, bone broth is beautifully rich, flavorful, and super nutritious...AND it's crazy easy to make!
Since starting the farm, we have had limited funds and space, so we initially chose to start raising poultry. We eagerly anticipated the day when we would welcome larger animals like cows and pigs to the farm.
We moved to our new leased property earlier this year, began preparing to expand the farm, and two weeks ago, we brought home three pigs, two of which were pregnant!
I’m envisioning perfectly crisped skin and juicy, flavorful meat…..you know how you guarantee that?! BRINE! In this post, I’m going to walk you through the basic steps for brining meat, specifically chicken. Chicken is one of the leanest meats and especially if you’re cooking over dry heat, aka roasting in the oven or cooking on a grill, you still want to get that juicy end product. Brining will help you do just that!
The point of a brine is to force moisture into the meat, along with salt and any other flavors you add. I’ll walk you through the basic recipe and give you some tips on how to make it your own.
For those of you intimidated by a whole chicken, don’t be! It’s all just a little bit of a learning process. If you want super easy (which I do most of the time), you can literally stick the whole bird on a roasting pan in the oven to cook for roughly 15 minutes per pound or until internal temperature is 160-165 degrees.
BUT sometimes, you just want to do something different and I’d love to show you a couple ways you can cut a whole bird depending on how you’d like to cook it. PLUS, buying whole birds is the best value AND you get to use all the leftover bones for bone broth, woohoo!
I used to ask myself the same question.
Rather, I didn't really know what any of the labels meant, I just figured I'd get the cheapest meat I could find...it couldn't be that different, right?!
I was WRONG!
Before deciding to start a farm, we began researching the health benefits of pasture raised poultry and were BLOWN AWAY by what we found!
You want to eat healthy and so you try to find quick & easy snacks that are not only good for you, but yummy too!
Hard boiled eggs are just that. Super packed with nutrients, an egg-cellent source of protein (see what I did there?!), and delicious with even just salt and pepper!
You can boil a dozen or two at the beginning of the week and have an easy pre-made snack for the whole week…or maybe just a couple days depending on how much you like hard boiled eggs :)
Joe and I LOVE Thanksgiving!
We thoroughly enjoy spending the morning cooking alongside family (well, I love this, Joe is mostly the taste tester, HA!) and sharing a delicious meal with people we love.
Probably something you didn’t know about Joe and I - we are terrible gift givers. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE giving gifts, BUT sometimes it’s so much pressure, especially at Christmas time.
So, we love this “no pressure” holiday.
And we love getting to know where our Thanksgiving turkey comes from and that it was raised with the utmost care. Read more to learn our suggestions for how to prepare it!
