Jenn and I are finally trying to buy a farm, which has gotten me thinking quite a bit about risk (no, not the Risk pictured above). Before we decided that we wanted to own and operate a farm, my perspective on risk related to property was limited to a modest mortgage for a house and…
I arrived Friday morning a few minutes late. I promised to be there at 7 am for the first deliveries, but I hit traffic and the trailers were lined up. The first one had already been emptied and that beef producer was staying around to help unload some of the cattle coming behind. An annual…
This will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows Jenn and I, but we have a lot of cookbooks. Not a crazy “I need a curator for all of my books” amount, but a lot. And, even less of a surprise, I have a lot of cookbooks about grilling and barbecue. One of…
The time has come where Chris and I are moving forward on finding our new farm. We aren’t sure how that’s going to end up, but it means that we are now actively looking. The first one, naturally, was the farm that initiated this major change in our lives starting two years ago. It’s finally…
A few days ago, I wrote an article for the New England Barbecue Society’s newsletter in the National Barbecue News that talks about the time we barbecue competitors put into practicing the craft. It was inspired in part by a comment made by Andy Husbands, the Chef/Owner of Boston’s Tremont 647 (and member of the…
by Jenn As described several weeks ago, waiting for lambs is hard. That’s not the only hard thing in farming (particularly livestock farming). Actually many things are hard. And worrisome. And stressful. And sometimes horrific. I’ll spare the details but the point is: farming is not all sunshine and lambs. That’s why farmers must carry…
There is a mantra in the food service industry – “work clean.” Put simply, it means that the chef should always work in a clean space – both physically and mentally. But really, it means more than that. In his cookbook “Ruhlman’s Twenty,” Chef and writer Michael Ruhlman starts his book (which I will talk…
For four days, I’ve had this Tom Petty song stuck in my head. Four days ago, the calendar predicted the arrival of our first lambs. No appearance yet. The calendar is a fickle, paper thing. We have lambing predictors based on various back dates of your choice. Since I did not use a ram harness…
Welcome to our new blog! Jenn and I had intentions of starting things off at the beginning of the new year, but as is often the case, life, the universe, and everything got in our way. So here we are now at the end of March with winter slowly releasing its bitter grasp on us. We’ve…