ducks | KW Homestead

Tag: ducks (page 3 of 5)

Pekin Duck Recipe 1: High Heat, Low Time

October 13, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

We’ve been experimenting with Pekin duck recipes over the last few weeks, learning about the best ways to cook our new favorite meal!We want to offer you some of our thoughts about our simple recipes, in case you are new to cooking duck and wonder how it should be done. So far we’ve cooked 4 ducks in 4 different ways, and we do have our favorite techniques! The exciting thing that we’ve learned from all this cooking, is that it’s really hard to ruin duck, short of burning it. There is so much fat that the meat never dries out the way chicken or turkey does when overcooked. Knowing this should help quell your fear about cooking duck… Just go for it!

Here is the first recipe we tried!

High Heat, Low Time: 425 degrees for 2 hours

Score the skin on both sides so that the fat will cook out of the bird and pool in the bottom of the dish. This allows the meat to stay moist but the skin to get crispy!

Cover the duck liberally with salt and garlic powder.

Flip the bird 2 or 3 times during the cooking time, spaced evenly throughout the 2 hour time period.

Cut the breast out of the bird after 1 hour and 15 minutes and continue cooking the rest of the meat for another 45 minutes.

Ducks going in the oven!

Taste Test:

The breast was overcooked and a little dry. We learned that we should have cut it out much sooner!

The legs were a perfect moistness.

The skin was partially crispy, which was great for me but Jason would have preferred it crispier!

Stay tuned for the second recipe we tried!

.:.

Beginning Fresh This Fall: A Homestead Recovers From an Injury

October 12, 2015 / Emma / 1 Comment

We realize that it has been almost 2 months since we’ve posted regularly… And as I’ve briefly mentioned in past posts, the last few months have been busy and difficult.

I feel that there is finally time for Jason and I to breathe, relax, and reflect on everything that has happened.

On July 31, I was in the front yard setting up electric fencing and Jason was in the back yard processing a pig. I heard a yell and knew that something was terribly wrong. Jason yelled for help again, and I ran around to the backyard but he wasn’t there when I got there. I followed him into the basement and saw a trail of blood drops from the door to the sink, with Jason running his hand under the water.

He started to feel faint and I sat him down and looked at his hand. We stopped the bleeding and I didn’t look very closely, but I could tell that he definitely needed stitches. Our closest hospital is 20 minutes away and we drove there. We spent almost 10 hours in total in the ER and driving to and from 2 different hospitals.

Jason had been using a very, very sharp 14 inch blade for processing and he switched to his left hand to make a cut. The knife slipped and gouged his right palm and index finger. He ended up with a severed artery, nerve, nicked tendon sheath (we’re thankful the tendon was fully in tact), 13 stitches, a cast, and an August 6 surgery date.

His hand was immobilized in a cast that kept the pressure off of his tendons (since they weren’t sure if the tendon was damaged until they went into surgery). After the surgery, he had to deal with a smaller cast (shown below) and the inability to move at all without feeling pain.

Jason’s second, post-surgery cast.

His physical therapist says that he will make a full recovery, and we both consider now to be a time when things feel healed, both with his hand and with our homestead. He hasn’t felt pain for many weeks, and he has regained almost full mobility!

The homestead is now operating at a higher level than it was when he was healing (we were just trying to get through day during that time), and we’ve seen the fruits of our labors: we’ve begun to sell Pekin ducks and duck eggs. The heritage turkeys are growing every day and we can’t believe how close Thanksgiving really is!

If there is just one thing we’ve learned (and there really is more than just one), it is that the life we have chosen, our homestead life, is meant for the both of us. We need each other. When one of us is down, the other one has to try to do double (and it just isn’t possible on the scale in which we’re operating).

There is still a lot to do to catch up and get ahead and ready for winter and next year, but we’re starting to feel “normal” again.

We’ve both learned a lot about our chosen life and our partnership during the last few months, and we’re proud to say that we celebrated our 1st wedding anniversary a few weeks ago on September 27. For us, our anniversary was a great chance to think of our fresh start for this fall!

We are also going to be posting more often (let’s hope we can get back up to every day), so stay tuned for more information about new things going on around Kuska Wiñasun Homestead, like:

Our new dog, Coona
Our experience selling ducks and eggs at market
The new turkey house
Some delicious duck recipes!

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Goslings Meet the Geese…

September 1, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

We recently moved the goslings in with the adult geese and ducks. They are still in their own separate cage, but we thought it was a good idea to go ahead and get them introduced to the other geese…

The goslings were a little bit nervous at first, but quickly realized that they were geese too! Now they usually watch the geese or stand around eating grass.

The geese were more interested in the goslings than I expected! All 4 of them went up to the babies’ cage and honked at them, then walked away and came back and honked at them again. It’s as if they are welcoming them and bullying them at the same time!

Watch the video to see what happened!

.:.

Duck Feet Soup: Medicine in Broth

August 19, 2015 / Emma / 4 Comments

Jason injured his hand about 3 weeks ago and he had surgery 2 weeks ago. He cut himself butchering a pig and sliced through the nerve, artery, and nicked the tendon sheath of his right hand’s pointer finger.

It’s been a slow road to recovery… He hasn’t been able to move around much because of the pain/discomfort and it’s always hard to do very much for yourself with only one hand in operation.

So… We’ve been looking for ways for him to heal faster. Your diet, of course, is really the most important component of healing!

And what better meal to eat than a meal made of the very organic materials that are healing? Tendons, muscles, and nerves!

24 duck feet waiting in the pot!

So we made the most delicious duck foot soup! We had 24 feet from our duck butchery a few months ago. We made it Vietnamese style, with spicy peppers, soy sauce, carrots, garlic, onions, celery, and tons of shiitake mushrooms! Shiitake mushrooms have numerous health benefits: they fight “bad” bacteria, viruses, and contain tons of B vitamins and many other micronutrients that are essential to life and healing. To this soup we added rice noodles and fresh cilantro and basil.

It was perhaps the most delicious meal we’ve had in months… And it’s gone now. We ate it for lunch and dinner every day until there was no more!

The feet of birds are often very fatty (unprocessed animal fat from healthy, organic animals is good for you!!!) and filled with awesome gelatin and nutrients! We moaned in enjoyment while we ate!

Yummy soup!

Let’s see how he heals now!!!

.:.

Ducklings and Goslings Tour the Yard

August 17, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

This video shows you typical duckling and gosling behavior!

Sometimes we let the little buggers (literally, bug hunters!) out for a chance to roam free. We still have to keep an eye on them because they are small enough to be hurt by a larger chicken or taken by a hawk (especially the ducklings). Today they got a solid 2 hours of freedom out in the yard, where they enjoyed chasing bugs, sun bathing, chowing down on seed heads, and drinking from random puddles of water!

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Kids and Farm Animals: A Great Time!

August 14, 2015 / Emma / 2 Comments

Nothing makes our day more than having kids come visit us at the homestead. Beginning some time next month, we will be hosting a homestead tour so all interested kids and adults can come see the animals for themselves. But in the meantime, let these videos of our friend Meredith and her lovely kids, Emi and Teddy, make you smile.

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Electric Fencing for Poultry

August 10, 2015 / Emma / Comments Off

Our electric poultry fencing has been an eye-opening experiment so far…

What we’ve learned:

1. Setting up the fencing takes a few hours each time but depending on how large of a space we make, the birds can occupy the space for weeks at a time.

2. The ducks respect the fence, and since getting shocked a few times, have stayed as far away from the fence as possible. Every few days a duck will get spooked, and since we have not clipped their wings, it might fly over by accident. It sometimes takes the poor duck a few hours to get up the nerve to jump back through the fence. They definitely respect the boundaries!

3. The geese are the most respectful of all, never going over and never coming close to the fence.

4. The turkeys are a different story, however! They respect the fence on a hit-and-miss basis, sometimes staying inside the fence and other times taking the shock and climbing through. The most annoying part is that when they have no trouble escaping, they have loads of trouble figuring out how to get back in. We are looking into getting electrified netting to use for the turkeys in the future, but we’ll see!

The big electric-fencing-for-poultry lesson is:

Simple electrified strands work for ducks and geese, but not for turkeys!

.:.

Cleanup Ducks

July 9, 2015 / jason / Comments Off

Our flock of Golden Layer and Cayuga ducks are a hungry bunch. They spend their days hunting bugs and nibbling on weeds in between twice daily feedings of our non-gmo feed.

Some of our ducks, lining up to be fed

We keep them on a pretty tight diet, otherwise they would get a little too big and their egg laying would suffer down the road. As such, they are always on the lookout for a snack, usually a grasshopper or a bite of clover, but their ravenous appetite can be put to other use on the homestead.

hungry ducks following and cleaning up after the turkeys

You see, our heritage turkeys are currently in a move-able tractor that we paddock across the pasture daily. They also get a ration of non-gmo feed, but they tend to waste a good bit of it, especially the smaller pieces. This is where the ducks come in handy. Because they are so keen on finding food, we can easily herd our flock to the recently vacated space left by the turkey tractor where they furiously search for and cleanup any leftover and wasted grain. They glean a fair amount of food value form the turkey leavings, which otherwise would go to waste.

A win-win for all!

A Fantastic Farm to Your School Day!

July 8, 2015 / Emma / 1 Comment

KW Homestead’s first Farm to Your School experience was a great one, with another school visit coming up on July 9th!

I just wrapped up the 2014-2015 school year as a Teacher’s Assistant at a school in High Point, and Jason and I decided to offer a free Farm to Your School adventure to the kindergarten, first, and second grade kids that I worked with everyday. A few days before the last day of school, we packed up our chickens, ducks, and a really friendly piglet named Half Nose and carted them over to Johnson Street Global Studies K-8 Magnet School.

Each of the 6 classes had 30 minutes to enjoy the animals… A perfect amount of time for the kids to get quality time with each set of animals. I ran the Pig Station, where students got to pet and scratch our piglet. They were lucky enough to get to her some of her piggy noises, and some of our favorite questions were:

“Is she wagging her tail because she is happy?”

“Why her her hair so scratchy but her skin so soft?”

Jason ran the Duck Station and the kids were able to feed the ducks and watch Jason employ some of his ninja skills while catching a duck for them to pet. Some of our favorite questions from the Duck Station were:

“Why do they sit in the water and then drink it?”

“Why do they always walk together?”

Each classroom teacher supervised the kids while they looked at the rooster and hen, and they loved hearing the rooster crow and (their favorite) watching both chickens poop!

We had a fantastic day, and the time we spent sharing our animals with the kids really flew by… I think we found one of our passions!

If you are interested in booking Farm to Your School at your school, church or family get-together, send us an email at ourochreway@gmail.com and check out our Farm to Your School pricing page!

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Baby Ducks On An Outdoor Adventure!

April 13, 2015 / Emma / 1 Comment

Our newest addition to the homestead, our Hybrid Layer and Cayuga ducklings, finally got to explore the outside world for the first time! When they are a little bit older, we plan to keep them in their newly finished shed/house during the night, and every morning usher them out to a pen so they can enjoy the world and the sun!

We tried our hand at herding them for the first time the other day, to see if they would be easier to herd than our Khaki Campbell ducks. They did super well, and were so excited to leave their cage and find new bugs to eat and rocks to peck at!

We herded them to a small, exposed space with one of the kiddie pools inside. It was filled with water, and the ones that could figure out how to get inside had a great time… Diving under and splashing water everywhere.

Check out this video for the full experience… Beginning with their first glimpse of beyond the cage and ending with wet and sloppy babies!

.:.

KW Homestead

Pasture Raised Poultry & Edible Landscaping Plants Since 2013