Welcome

Welcome to our country home, complete with gravel road (but unfortunately no barn).

This is the direction most people come from when they visit. If you keep going north on this road, you cross a 4 lane highway and then end up in Colchester, population 1500. Before you get to Colchester, there is a four lane highway. If you turn right onto the highway, you will end up in Macomb, population about 18,000.

It’s hard to see in this picture, but there is a bridge. That’s the bridge that goes over the big creek near our house, aptly named Troublesome Creek, which floods frequently.

Country road, north view

Here is our mailbox. We have a new one, but still need to paint it and put it out. I did, however, spruce it up with some plants and a little border (with a little help from Tim).

Spruced up mailbox area

South view of country road, with entrance to our place on left

We have a little creek that feeds into the big creek. There is a small bridge over our creek, but the creek still floods and we have mud patches on either side of the bridge. If you look on the left of the picture below, you can see some stubble from the corn, still, but mostly it looks like dark green, lush grass. That’s the oats. There are two fields on either side of the driveway. This field on the left of the picture ends, but shortly after it ends, way up that hill, there is another much bigger field. The other field is up the road in the picture above. The house is way in the background (it’s a white kind of blob). There are two small black dots to the left of the telephone pole and those are Sweetie Cow and Bullseye, our two calves.

View from the "bridge" near the front of the lane.

In this next picture you can see the house a little better and you can see the dark green oats on either side of the lane. The lighter green stuff is NOT oats and is a mixture of grass and weeds.

View of the oats and the house

We love where we live. It is private and secluded, but also close to town. We are surrounded by trees and animals. I do miss my Phoenix friends, and I know the kids do, too. But we also live closer to family now and we are happy we moved.

Barn envy

Before we moved, Tim drove from Phoenix to Illinois to bring a bunch of our stuff to the new house. Tom and I had only seen lots of pictures of the house and heard descriptions from my sister-in-law, mother-in-law, and a friend of the family who went to see the house. Tim told us that the road right by the house was gravel, which was a surprise to me (even though it should not have been a surprise). He also kept calling the large shed a barn. I argued that it was not a barn, but just a big shed. I was not mentally prepared to move from the suburbs to a place in the country with a gravel road and a barn. Now, about 7 months later, the gravel road is normal and I really wish our shed were indeed a barn. I see all kinds of barns and I want one. I have a serious case of barn envy.

Local food (and a few recipes)

I am buying more and more food locally. I have been buying Grama Sue’s eggs for several months. On Saturday, I met her in person since she was at the grocery store selling her eggs. I was pretty excited to meet her and she seemed pleased that I already had her eggs in my cart. I told her that I always buy her eggs if the store has them, but that unfortunately she would be losing a customer since I now have my own chickens. Lately, I’ve been able to buy more local food because my garden is producing food and the Farmer’s Markets have started. The Farmer’s Market in the small town near us, Colchester, started 3 weeks ago and the one in Macomb started on Thursday. I’ve been buying asparagus from Eli, who is Amish and has been at the Colchester Farmer’s Market every Saturday. I like buying vegetables from the Amish because I am quite sure they do not use any pesticides or herbicides. This is an assumption on my part, so I should probably ask to make sure.

Anyway, Friday night’s dinner was a quiche and a salad. I used Grama Sue’s eggs and some green onions from our garden for the quiche; The salad included leaf lettuce and radishes from our garden. The quiche recipe I use is a crustless broccoli and cheese quiche from Vegetarian Times. One of the cool things about quiche: you can substitute for the vegetables or the cheese. Last night I did not use the nutmeg or the mustard and I used some colby jack and cheddar cheeses instead of low-fat swiss. I often use mozzarella, but any cheese would do. It just depends on what you have on hand and what kind of cheese you like. I also didn’t have enough broccoli, so I added some asparagus I bought at the Farmer’s Market. Dinner was good because a) I actually cooked something for a change, b) it had fresh ingredients from our garden or that were bought locally, and c) the recipe is a good recipe.

Dessert was also good. I used this recipe for the rhubarb I bought on Thursday at the Farmer’s Market in Macomb. The recipe was a big hit; it didn’t last past the cleaning up from dinner. The recipe calls for 4 cups of rhubarb. I only had about 3 and a half cups, so I substituted with some strawberries (also from the Farmer’s Market). I am sure you could do 2 cups of strawberries and 2 cups of rhubarb if you wanted. It was tart, but also sweet. I think that if you add strawberries, you might want to reduce the sugar a bit. It just depends on how sweet you want it. I was using organic cane sugar, which seems to be a bit sweeter than regular sugar.

Saturday we hit two Farmer’s Markets so we picked up some asparagus, radishes, onions, tomatoes, ground beef, and some herbs to transplant in the garden. Dinner included local grass-fed, organic beef (though they are not certified because that costs money!), onion and tomato bought at the Farmer’s Market, and lettuce from my garden.

One thing I have learned about the Farmer’s Markets is that earlier is better. For example, let’s pretend you want to buy rhubarb. Well, you’d better get to the Farmer’s Market early because everyone else in town wants to buy rhubarb, too. Also, some people only bring a little bit of stuff and then they pack up and leave if they sell it all. So if you arrive towards the end of the market, you might miss out on some things. However, we did score a free hot dog because the beef people were leaving and didn’t want to take it home.

P. S. While searching for rhubarb recipes, I found this blog entry, which has recipes for dandelions, including a video on how to make dandelion fritters. I still have not tried dandelions (and I think it’s too late in the season at this point, also), but it seemed to go well with last week’s post.