Belvedere Farms

Farming for Flavor and Raising our Family on 47 Acres in NE Ohio

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5 Meals or More With 1 Pasture-Raised Chicken

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Before we started raising our own heritage breed chicken on fresh air, local non-GMO grains, lots of sunshine, and green pasture, it would take 2-3 birds to feed our crew.

Now though? Now we can stretch one bird into 5 or more meals. No skimping. No joking.

Here’s how we do it:

  • Meal 1: Roast Chicken

We process all of our birds right here on the farm. Every day is a good day for these birds and they live the best chicken life. And after processing hundreds and hundreds of birds and training many many family, friends, acquaintances, neighbors, students, and like-minded folks of all ages (even the youngest kids have a job), we’ve honed the process to be as quiet, efficient, and honorable as possible. We package every bird whole – it’s simple, efficient, and is the most versatile. Any kind of meal is possible with a whole bird.

Because of that, in our family, we most often eat chicken as a whole roast chicken. No one complains because it’s amazing and delicious and so simple to put together.

Rub the chicken all over inside and out with salt (I probably use about 1-2 tablespoons). Cut an onion and lemon in half and stuff into the cavity. Add fresh (or dried) rosemary and sage if you’ve got them. Roast at 350* until the temperature in the thigh registers 165* (usually right around an hour).

Serve with, well, anything: fresh or frozen vegetables, a robust green salad, roast or mashed potatoes.

  • Meal 2: Chicken Tacos

There’s something about a homegrown pasture-raised chicken. A little goes a long way and even though we’ve got a crew of 5 growing kids, we still have leftovers. These almost always get turned into chicken tacos. Because tacos.

Chop 2 cups leftover chicken. Combine in a saucepan with 1/2 pint salsa verde. Warm. Serve over toasted tortillas with all your favorite toppings. Ours include a cilantro cabbage slaw, cojita or other cheese, avocado, diced red onion and more salsa verde.

  • Meal 3: Chicken Pot Pie Soup

Even after feeding our crew two whole meals, there’s still more chicken to go around. The last 1-2 cups of leftover meat gets chopped and tossed into soup (in my opinion, soup is the best way to stretch a small amount of meat into a robust meal to feed a crew our size). One of our favorite soups is Chicken Pot Pie Soup – all the warm thick comforting goodness of chicken pot pie without the time of adding a pie crust. My kids love it so much that it’s become a regular birthday dinner request.

I’ll use chicken stock I’ve preserved from a previous roast chicken, plus vegetables from our garden, and milk and butter from our cows. It’s hearty and filling and perfect comfort food for chilly days.

  • Meals 4-8: Bone broth/stock

Now that all the meat has been repurposed into other meals, we’re left with the carcass and bones. I add these to a large stockpot with whatever vegetable scraps I have on hand. I always include celery, carrot, onion, garlic, and 6-8 peppercorns. I also like to add parsley, rosemary, or sage. I let this simmer on the stove for 12-24 hours. Not boiling, mind you – it’s best to not let it boil. Keep it low and let it simmer for a long long time to extract all the goodness from those pasture-enriched bones.

In my stockpot, one chicken carcass will make 7-8 quarts of stock. I’ll make a pot of soup right away with the fresh stock – often something like Broccoli Cheddar Soup or Chicken Noodle Soup or Vegetable Bean Soup. We also like to heat the broth and drink it with scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.

The remaining 4-6 quarts I will process in the pressure canner to make them shelf stable and add to the pantry. We’ll use it for soups, stews, cooking rice, sauces and much much more for weeks to come.

So there you have it. One chicken and more than 5 whole, nutrient-dense, filling and delicious meals to feed your family and nourish your bodies.

My daughter asked this week if we were rich. “We sure are,” I told her. “We have everything we need and all the delicious food we could ever want.” In my book, that’s true wealth.

If you’d like to try your hand at stretching one pasture-raised chicken to feed your family for nearly a week, you can reserve an October-harvested bird here or call/text/stop by the farm and pick one up this week.

People who love to eat are always the best people.

Julia Child

Tacos de Lengua – Beef Tongue Tacos

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sous vide tacos de lengua beef tongue tacos

We love whole animal butchery. It is delicious (most of the time, I’ll admit that I’m not a fan of straight liver, but I enjoy pâtés), it is economical, and it respects the whole animal. One of the biggest hurdles I’ve found to enjoying whole animal butchery is knowing what to do with all the different cuts, especially uncommon cuts like beef tongue.

I’m always fascinated when I watch our cows eat – they don’t have upper teeth, like a horse that can bite the grass down to the ground, so they extend their tongue, wrap it around the grass they want to eat, and then tear it back with their neck and pull in that bunch of up cycled sunshine and chew, and chew, and ruminate, and then chew some more. The tongue is long, covered in a thick, course membrane for grabbing and holding on to that grass without getting a raw, grass-cut tongue, and I’m pretty sure it is the second most used muscle after the heart (can’t find data on that though, so feel free to hit me with the fact checks). It is unlike any other part of the cow and doesn’t offer an intuitive solution to cooking it.

This is one of the many reasons that here at the farm: we love learning how different cultures use ingredients, especially ones that we don’t regularly encounter like beef tongue.

I flew to Las Vegas this weekend to celebrate my late sister’s birthday with my brother Ian. Moira would have been 32 this week – she died 3 years ago from a brain tumor. We all enjoyed cooking and trying new things, and Ian wanted to try cooking beef tongue, and using his new sous-vide for the first time. I did not pack beef tongue in my carry on – I’m pretty sure that would be an epic TSA story – so we visited one of the local Mexican meat markets and picked up some habñero pickled red onions and even spicier guacamole. Ha, I’ve been in Ohio away from proper spice levels for too long.

Because the tongue is such a strong, well used muscle, it needs a lot of cooking time to soften up. We rubbed a little oil on the tongue, added salt and pepper, and an onion, tomato, and cilantro to our vacuum seal bag, and set the sous-vide to 170 degrees. If you don’t have a sous-vide, you can use the more traditional manner of a long braise at low heat on the stove, but it was really nice to set the sous-vide and leave it for a day knowing it would be consistent throughout.

After 26 hours, we pulled the tongue, drained the juices from the bag, set the tongue in an ice bath to shock it and make removing the membrane easier. Once the membrane was removed, we diced the tongue into roughly half inch chunks. When you do this you’ll see how different the muscle structure of the tongue is than a steak or roast cut you’re more used to seeing. We kept the seasoning pretty simple and blended 4 chipotles in adobo sauce, an extra spoonful of the adobo sauce, a splash of lime juice, and a pinch of salt with half of the juices from the sous-vide bag. We put the rest of the juices in a cast iron skillet and sautéed some onion and added the beef tongue chunks and cooked them until they crisped up a little. You can add some of the chipotle sauce to the pan while doing this final cooking, or you can just drizzle it on the tacos.

Add your favorite toppings to your heated tortillas – we had the chipotle sauce, green onions, cilantro, guacamole, habañero pickled red onions, and cotijo cheese. Glorious! (We used street sized flour tortillas, but if you use corn you’ll probably want to use two tortillas per taco because the meat is wet, plus the sauce, and corn doesn’t hold that as well).

sous vide tacos de lengua beef tongue tacos
Print Recipe

Beef Tongue Tacos – Tacos de Lengua

Flavorful meat to elevate your next taco night
Prep Time45 mins
Cook Time1 d
15 mins
Total Time1 d 1 hr
Servings: 8

Equipment

  • Sous Vide Set it and forget it option
  • Dutch Oven Traditional method, which will require adding water or broth to submerge tongue, and more care in maintaining temperature.

Ingredients

  • 1 Beef Tongue Tongues vary in weight, but roughly 1.5-3 pounds
  • 2 tbsp Canola or Vegetable Oil Use more or less, depending on size of tongue
  • salt
  • pepper
  • 1 Onion cut into 2-4 chunks
  • 1 Tomato cut into 2-4 chunks
  • Cilantro 6-8 stems
  • 4 Chipotles in Adobo sauce use an extra spoon of the sauce
  • Lime Juice from one lime, or a splash to taste
  • 1/2 Diced Onion
  • All your favorite taco toppings

Instructions

  • Preheat sous-vide to 170. Or, if using dutch oven, preheat water or broth sufficient to cover tongue to roughly 170.
  • Rinse tongue, pat dry, rub with oil, salt, and pepper.
  • Add tongue, onion chunks, tomato chunks, and cilantro to vacuum bag. If using dutch oven method, add all directly to broth.
  • Submerge tongue and cook for 24 hours.
  • Remove tongue and reserve juices from the bag.
  • Set drained bag in an ice bath for 15 minutes.
  • Remove the membrane from the tongue.
  • Dice tongue into 1/2 inch chunks.
  • Add chipotle peppers and lime to half reserved liquid, blend, and add salt to taste.
  • Sauté diced onions in remaining liquid and add tongue. Cook down until the meat begins to crisp up. Feel free to add some of the chipotle sauce to this final cooking, or just add to tacos as you are making them.
  • Toast your tortillas.
  • Add your favorite taco toppings and fiesta!

All About Cream : Part 1

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If you’ve ever wondered “What can I do with raw milk?” well then this series, wherein we explore all the delicious possibilities raw milk provides, will be right up your alley.

We’re starting with cream because, well, cream is my favorite.

Like eat-it-with-a-spoon-favorite.

“I have too much cream” – said no one ever.

And yet, when you get almost a quart of cream to every gallon, and your cow is giving 3-4 gallons a day, that cream adds up fast.

If this is you and you’ve got more cream than you know what to do with, this two-part series all about cream is for you.

What is cream?

Cream is the fat of the milk.

I am constantly amazed at the magic a milk cow conjures as she transform grass – nearly inedible for most species and certainly incapable of sustaining life and reproduction – into one of the most delicious, nutritionally balanced, super foods with oodles of beneficial bacteria, probiotics, enzymes, and glorious, delicious fat.

Rising To The Top

You’ve heard of the idiom “cream rises to the top,” yes? The essential idea is that the best ideas, the most skilled people, are the most noticeable because they “rise to the top” and stand out. There’s a good practical wisdom in that idiom because cream really is the best part of the milk, if you ask me.

When you let raw milk sit for 12-24 hours, the cream (or fat) will rise to the top. For some breeds of milk cow (like Dexter), the fat globules are very small and so it takes longer for the cream to separate and rise (closer to 2-3 days).

Fun (slightly unrelated) fact: the fat globules in goat’s milk are even smaller and so the cream never separates at all. Therefore, goat’s milk is naturally homogenized, meaning the cream/fat is evenly distributed throughout the milk.

Heavy Cream

The cream at the very top of the jar will be what is often known as “heavy cream.” It is thick and dense. You can almost stand a spoon upright in it.

My kids like to call this creme de la creme and that’s exactly where that particular idiom comes from: heavy cream is literally the cream of the cream, the best of the best.

Important: If you want to make whipped cream, you must use heavy cream.

Heavy cream will also produce the highest yields when churned to butter.

Light Cream

The light cream settles below the thick heavy cream at the top, but still above the liquid milk. You’ll notice that it’s not as thick and doesn’t stick to your ladle or spoon as thickly/stubbornly as the heavy cream at the top.

Remember – light cream cannot be whipped. It has too much liquid and won’t properly set up into soft peaks.

But it’s great for ice cream! And it will still make great butter, even if the yield is a little less than when you churn heavy cream.

Skimming Cream At Home

Skimming (or separating) cream refers to the process of removing the cream from the milk. For me (and most homesteaders), this is done manually with a ladle or spoon.

I like to use extra-wide-mouth gallon jars for all my milk because it makes skimming cream easier and more efficient and I am alll about maximizing my cream yield.

I use a stainless steel 1/2 cup kitchen ladle to manually skim each gallon, and scoop one ladle at a time, transferring it to another jar (fitted with a stainless steel wide mouth funnel to minimize the mess).

A Great Tip for Skimming Cream

Run the ladle under warm water just before skimming – the thin layer of water lets the cream slide off the ladle better and prevents a really thick buildup of cream.

Separating Cream Commercially

Commercial dairy processing systems use a mechanical cream separator (really cool, but generally cost-prohibitive for the average homesteader), and use centrifugal force to extract all the cream from the milk.

Because each cow gives a little different percentage of cream, each vat of milk will vary slightly in its cream fat percentage.  A cream separator equalizes every vat of milk by removing all the cream no matter how much it had to begin with.

The cream is later added back to the milk in the volume required to meet the mandated percentages for each product (3.25% (whole), 2%, 1%)

The Bottom Line

When you have more milk than you can use, always keep the cream.

Skim the cream and make butter.

Freeze the butter to use during her dry period.

Make self-stable ghee for your pantry.

Make lifelong friends of your neighbors by giving that yellow gold away.

Make gallons of ice cream and host a party.

Make cream cheese and cheese cake.

But always keep the cream.

Skimmed milk can go to the pigs. 1 gallon of skimmed milk or whey is all the protein a pig needs in a day and you can substitute milk pound for pound for their grain ration with no loss in nutrition.

I know. You’re gonna want to know how to make all these things. And more. I gotcha.

In part 2, we’ll talk about all the delicious ways you can use that abundance of cream.

The possibilities are downright delicious.

Stay tuned.