A delicious dinner.

12/25/19

(Above – Today’s dinner consisted of: roasted upside-down turkey/accompanying juice-soaked bread, vegetable/gruyere dressing, garden-fresh salad, corn, homemade bread, Madre’s homemade cranberry sauce, gravy, and probably more that I’m not thinking of at the moment in my current turk-comatic state.)

Active Summary: After waking and performing calisthenics at 6:00 AM, I mixed together a no-knead dough with the intention of making Dutch oven bread. This was ensued by about half an hour of writing and then by a beef pasture check with Padre. Next, I returned to Jacobhouse, baked the bread dough, and wrote for a little over half-an-hour.

After the magnificent loaf had been cooked and extracted from the Dutch Oven, I ventured up to Oldhouse and prepared the turkey that I started brining yesterday. This included patting the bird dry, cutting loaves of bread to place under the breast meat (cooked the bird upside-down again), preparing a dressing from sauteed vegetables* / gruyere cheese / day-old home baked bread, stuffing the turkey with said dressing, coating the turkey with olive oil and black pepper, and then placing it into a 450 degree F oven for 2 hours. During that 2 hour span, I spent some time with Padre down at the office near old house, harvested some greens from the garden for a sizeable salad, and retrieved the bread that I had made earlier in the day.

The morning ended with a magnificent lunch (pictured above).

(5:58 PM Update:) This afternoon consisted of many different cattle activities, including: rounding up and treating a couple sick calves, feeding cows, watering/feeding calves, fixing a fence around a water trough, and running a few cows through the treatment chute. After the evening beef check, I returned to Jacobhouse and am now going to have some leisure time.

TIL:  Today I learned a little bit about the properties of homemade coconut ice cream. First of all, it is beneficial to remove the confection from the freezer and get it thawing well over 30 minutes before serving time. Secondly, I discovered that the more coconut oil / fat content a coconut ice cream possesses, the smoother it is and the easier it is to remove from its vessel. Next time, I will likely be adding 2-3 tbsp. coconut oil (or butter or olive oil) to each batch of homemade icecream to improve consistency and ease-of-extraction, rather than simply adding it to provide additional flavor**.

Commentary: Last year on this day, I was working on Jacobhouse. As a matter of fact, I believe I spent a major portion of 2018’s Christmas morning rectifying an odd angle at the eastern end of the bathroom (pictured below***). This year, I baked bread in Jacobhouse and harvested arugula, kale, and spinach from the garden just outside of the office window. The sheer difference between these two sets of tasks shows just how much can be accomplished by pecking away at a goal one day at a time.

Final Note: Tomorrow I shall begin painting the freezer room orange.

*1 Zucchini, 1 Summer Squash, ½ purple onion, ½ Vidalia onion, 2 cloves minced garlic, 2 tbsp. drizzled olive oil, ¾ loaf of homemade bread (cubed), ¾ tsp. poultry seasoning, liberal amounts of fresh ground black pepper, and about ½ tsp. kosher salt. I didn’t need much salt because the turkey was dry-brined.  

** I added 2-3 tbsp. of extra virgin coconut oil to my batch of coconut / vanilla ice cream. The original reason for this was to add more ‘coconuty’ flavor, but it also provided an additional side-benefit of making the ice cream softer for serving.

*** A picture of what I was working on last year at this time: