Grow your culinary skills

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August 25, 2021

Listening to a recent podcast, a chef explained that he keeps cooking and experimenting in his home kitchen to improve his skills, find new dishes, and even as a stress release during hard times. This was encouraging for me because although my skills are no where near that of a professional I like to cook. I enjoy our transition toward more purposeful "slow food" meals. A couple years ago I don't think I had ever cooked a whole chicken; never attempted to make different meals out of leftovers; and rarely cooked "from scratch" type meals.

Just this week we have cooked a whole bird in the instant pot, picked the leftovers for chicken salad, and then made chicken stock/bone broth out of the leftover carcass. Another night we had chicken wings and boneless/skinless chicken breasts on our Traeger (pellet grill/smoker). Cooking can be a solitary event but it can also be extremely social. I love when my wife or kids cook with me. My son is even taking culinary arts in high school so his skills are likely to surpass all of us.

Roasting a whole chicken is our favorite. It guarantees two meals (even for a family of 6). The first meal is the carved chicken itself. The second meal is either white chicken chili, chicken salad, or chicken enchiladas. Then the final bonus is the chicken stock/bone broth that we make from everything that is left. The cover photo for this blog post is our rich, golden, nutrient dense, chicken stock. This becomes the base for a variety of future dishes and makes our white chicken chili by far the best I've ever had.

My cooking skills still have a long way to go. Practicing is therapeutic and typically results in very good food and occasionally something truly exceptional. We will try to start sharing the journey toward better tasting and healthier food on this blog as well as email and Instagram. Hopefully we can encourage you on your journey toward healthier and more delicious food. The feedback we are getting from customers certainly encourages me! If you don't already, I encourage you to start cooking. If you already cook, I encourage you to challenge yourself to cook more dishes and learn more techniques. I hope you will join us on this food journey.

Snow!

I love living and farming in Virginia! We like to call our home county "God's Country." After growing up in Florida, I truly appreciate living somewhere that experiences all four seasons. Snow is beautiful and I enjoy exactly one snow per winter. We have now exceeded that and personally I am ready to move on to Spring. This winter has already thrown significantly more challenges at us than all of last winter combined.The Snow is beautiful! It makes for fun pictures and we did enjoy some sledding this year. Snow is a good example of why we do not raise our pastured chickens in the winter. We choose not to fight nature. If we had birds on pasture during the two recent snow storms, we would've either had to raise them indoors (no longer pastured) or we would've experienced catastrophic losses and difficult/dangerous farm chores on the iced over snow. We will start back with our meat chickens in early Spring.Even though our poultry is seasonal, our pigs are a year round enterprise. We have pigs during the winter and they thrive! The snow does not phase them in the slightest. They love the hay that we supply for them to bed down in. They stay warm as they bed in "pig piles" covered in hay. They have a shelter but it is more for our peace of mind than the pigs. As long as they have sufficient access to hay they can handle any winter weather that Virginia can throw at them. The frozen ground is problematic for some of our infrastructure projects but we do them as the weather allows and are constantly learning and improving.This time of year is a great time to focus on healthy eating and cooking new things. We eat pork or chicken from the farm nearly every day. We make bone broth year round but we seem to go through it more rapidly in the winter as we make soups and chilis. I also drink a mug of hot bone broth every day. In the near future, we will write more about our weekly menu and showcase how we eat almost all protein from Carver Family Farms.In the future we will have cattle and sheep as additional year round enterprises. We are excited to learn and grow! I hope you will join us on this journey of healthy land, healthy animals, and healthy people.

Grow your culinary skills

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