~Italian Honey Bee vs. Minnesota Hygienic Bees~

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

The verdict isn’t quite in yet!  Did our Italian hives do better than our Minnesota Hygienic?  Thus far, it has been hard to tell; two years of totally opposite weather.  Our first year (with just Italians) being ideal with plenty of rain and nectar, and this past year having a late frost to begin with, slowing down an early nectar flow, followed by a dry late summer, shutting down some of the flowers that may have still been blooming had there been rain.   All of these factors go into consideration when trying to answer the question above.   It will be very interesting to see how many hives survive the Minnesota winter.  That will help influence our decision.

Despite the less than ideal weather situation, one of the Hygienic hives gave just as much access honey as the Italian bees gave the year before.  We left the hives around 100 pounds of honey each to sustain them throughout the winter.  Looking back on this past year, it was pretty amazing to have even extracted any honey from the new hives, which aren’t supposed to have any access honey their first year.

I guess it would be fair to say that we are happy with both species of bees, so far:)  Come Spring we will let you know how they over-wintered and that will be a deciding factor for sure.      Minnesota Hygienic’s are supposed to winter well and have a high resistance to  honey bee deseases and mites.   We shall see:)

We found a local source just over the border in South Dakota, not only for Queen bees, but for hive bodies.  They are reasonably priced and well-built and I think Fred and the Twins decided on replacing the 4 sets of 11 frame hives with new 10 frame hives.  The 11 frames are odd sized and the feeders don’t fit them well. 

It will be interesting to see whether or not the grease patties worked to control Varroa Mites too.  There is so much to learn and experience, both good and bad I suppose:)  It would be nice to see more people starting a few hives no matter where you live.

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~Poles Set For Hops Trellis~

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

 

On January 11, Fred and Caleb dug holes in one of our hops fields in order to place the utility poles in.  Hops grow very tall and get very heavy.  They need to have plenty of good  support.  Later, the guys will add strong cables.  This was amazing, to actually dig our ground in January, but Fred figured anything he can get done now  is that much less this Spring when he will be even busier.  Even in the dead of Winter, we are thinking ahead to what needs doing this Spring.  The bees are going to love the hops and the hops, in turn, will enjoy the benefit of our bees. 

 

Lucky for Caleb, Clayton stopped in after a full day of shearing sheep to drop off wool.  He cheerfully volunteered his help and even got a home-cooked meal for his efforts!!  (He moved to his own farm last Fall:)   They still have to straighten these poles and have another field to do on the hill but, it’s pretty darn cold for that kind of activity. I wonder if those who like beer know how much effort goes into a good bottle of beer:)  Same for the honey, effort from both the bees and the bee keepers!

Until Spring, we will be dreaming of hops, honey and home-brewed beer!  Delicious:)

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~In The Middle Of A Minnesota Winter!~

Posted on January 11, 2012 by Callens Honey Farm

I never posted this last night because it got very late, so I added this paragraph and the photo above of the small snow we had this morning:)  The photo is taken from the same angle as the softball photo below, which was taken yesterday.  Minnesota, make up your mind. 

This morning, I was awakened by Mario in his room next door.  He shouted out, “Winters here, Winters here. Thank you Jesus!  In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen”.  That nearly melted my heart, as well as had me flying to the window to see what he meant.  I could fill a book of all the cute, sweet and funny things our children have come up with over the years.  Thought you’d like that one above, which was blurted out all at once and with so much joy.  As for the weather today, Wednesday, let’s just say it looks pretty!  I had better post this before the weather changes again.

What a beautiful day we had today!  The weather seems to be a hot item for discussion lately.  It has been wonderful, even allowing us to butcher a beef last week. We have been blessed with an open winter, the only snow received having been on the day I picked up Nonna in Minneapolis.  I pray the dry spell will pass by Spring as we will really need the moisture for our hops.

Today was Fred’s 49th Birthday and as usual he worked the entire day, not wanting to waste an unseasonably warm day.  Marisa made his favorite apple pie and Frenchy made vanilla ice-cream.   I’ve never seen the kids do their school lessons so quickly, chomping at the bit to get out-of-doors!  Who can blame them?  I have never experienced such lovely days since moving here 26 years ago, and I must admit, I too was anxious to get outside:)  We even got in some softball practice and horseback riding which has been a frequent activity all winter. The babies and toddlers were out in strollers and wagons as well, soaking up the warmth; their mommies were thrilled to get out as well!

Normally, the snow would be piled up around here and way too cold to be out.  Another blessing of open the open winter is that the ponds are snow free and so last week we went out at night to ice skate, building a bonfire on the ice, and enjoyed a “days are getting longer” party, which was Peter’s idea. 

 

 

Fred and the boys laid manure on top of our hops plants to fertilize and insulate them, hopefully preserve any moisture they had coming into the winter.  We raked the yard, dismantled our Nativity Scene from the strawberry bed, dodged the honey bees, gave them water and observed them cleaning out the hives.  The boys and Fred also removed hardware and copper from the utility poles making them ready to use for the hops trellis’.  Mario felt like a real big guy today working alongside dad and Caleb, another blessing of family life, the young learning to work along side of father and siblings.  Marisa and Silvana worked their very young team of oxen as well.  Caleb, has done a fair amount of trapping this winter and has learned quite a bit; the traps were pulled yesterday.  The photos below were taken today, some in the morning and some later in the day. 

Happy New Year to all of you!

 

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~It’s A Wonderful Life~

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Callens Honey Farm

Merry Christmas to everyone from all of us!  What a beautiful weekend of Christmas celebration.  We couldn’t have asked for nicer weather.  This will go down in history for me as the first Christmas without snow, at least that I can recall.  After the initial shock, I saw the blessing in such mild weather.  We all  attended the 4:00 p.m. mass on Christmas Eve and then most of us attended the Mid-night mass as well.  Both were beautiful!  Christmas day was filled with great company, tasty food and ice-skating.

God bless each and every one of you.  Merry Christmas and all the best to you in 2012. 

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~Italian Sausage Anyone?~

Posted on December 20, 2011 by Callens Honey Farm

We discovered the other day that we were pretty much out of pork so Fred decided to butcher a hog.  It was cut and packaged yesterday and is now mostly saved in the freezer.  In a few days we will be smoking the hams and bacon.

Nonna wanted to make Italian sausage so we phoned my Aunt Lillia back in Rockville, Md for the recipe.  It was pretty easy and tasted exactly like it did when we used to buy it at Ehrlich’s Market back in East Stroudsburg, PA.  Basically, we put fresh ground pepper and  plain old salt into the ground pork sausage.  No seeds of any kind were added!!  The salt amount used was a teaspoon per pound and the black pepper added was 13 tsp. for 15 pounds of meat.  We cooked some on the wood stove to make sure of the right amounts of seasoning and it was very delicious, so we went ahead and stuffed the links.

Fred cleaned the intestines very well and soaked them in salt and he wished he would have saved more because we ran out.  We only had a couple of pounds left over and I just packaged them up to mix with the venison to make meatballs.

Nonna also asked my Aunt Lillia how to make another Italian delicacy which she called, Su Fritto di Fedaco, Cipolle and Polomoni. It is the hog lungs, liver and onions and it is a dish I could sure do without:) We all tasted it just to be nice. If you have never tasted lungs, they are a slimy consistency and you either like them or you don’t.  It was well worth our time and effort just to see how happy my mom was to taste something from her younger years, back in Roseto, Italy.  I’d do anything for my mother, even eat hog lungs, but only once:)

A favorite fast food around here are the ready-made sausage patties and we made 15 pounds of these.  They are very easy to make with a small press and the plastic sheets that go in between the patties.  These we did not season because, depending on whether they are eaten for breakfast or as a burger, the seasoning will change. 

 

We also made Blood Sausage which is another dish that you either like or dislike. The recipe we used is the one that Fred’s grandfather used at the Haas Bakery many years ago.  There wasn’t enough blood to make a large batch so I cut the recipe down in half.  It was nice making the entire mess out in the butcher shop and only doing the baking of the sausage in my kitchen.  The kids decided that next time we are going to stuff them into links, like they do at Hyvee Store in Marshall.  Yesterday though, we baked them in baking pans as we have always done in the past. 

While I was in the middle of packaging, labeling and freezing the meat, I received a phone call from a very nice lady named Debbie.  She wanted to order some of our honey.  Not knowing where she was from, I suggested it was less expensive if she wanted to pick up her order on our farm.  It was then that she surprised me by saying she was from California and that she had just read about our family in the National Catholic Register.  I checked it out and sure enough, our Callens Family was mentioned, just as she had stated.  Here is the link if you would like to read the page.

http://www.ncregister.com/blog/tim-drake/who-would-appear-on-catholic-idol

Thanks, Tim Drake, for your very kind words; it was very sweet of you to mention us!   Music is beautiful and good and has been a big part of our lives. We are tied to the farm and land. We have deliberately kept most of our performances fairly local (under 4 hours away) in order to sustain the farm life that we believe is so valuable to our family and spiritual life. 

God bless the talented Catholic performers out there, who have kept their strong faith, sense of modesty and morality, even while performing and competing in the secular world.  Sadly, that is not an easy thing to do these days.  Keep making music for the Glory of God and realize that talents are a real gift from Him.

Thanking  God now for family life, the freezers that are full of meat, veggies and fresh homemade butter, barns full of hay, a years worth of wood to heat our home, the refrigerator full of raw milk and our own cheese, pails of our own honey, the new batch of Honey Beer brewing in the basement, the hams and bacon curing out in the butcher shop, all  from His green earth.  The list goes on, but I am thinking along the farming and food line here tonight. 

May God bless you and your family during this beautiful Advent season.

 

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~Hand-made Cavatelli~

Posted on December 10, 2011 by Callens Honey Farm

I love being a full-blooded Italian, don’t let my light coloring fool you!  It’s always meant a great deal to me holding to some of the traditions that we had as kids growing up back East in the Poconos.  Being located so far away from all of my relatives is hard so  cooking the way my mom did helps make me feel closer to home.  Italians love to cook and eat and I’ve learned to make quite a few dishes with the help of mom over the phone.

My list of cooking accomplishments include, Pizza both Focaccia and Red, Lasagna, Eggplant Parmesan, Mozzarella and Parmesan cheese, Pasta Fagioli, Fried Zucchini Flowers,  many varieties of pasta sauces, Stuffed Artichokes, Stuffed Mushrooms, Calamari,  Stromboli, Meatballs, Pizzaiola, Italian Wedding Soup, Minestrone, Pizzelle, Pastarelle, Lemon Sponge Cake.  Then there is Scartellate, Sfgliatelle, Ricotta Pie, Calzone with Ricotta, Cannoli’s, Biscotti, and Pizza  Fritta.  This is a partial list, these being our favorites.

Well, recently mom decided it was time for the girls and I to learn how to make Cavatelli by hand.  In Italy, she said, you are not ready to become married, if you can’t make two-finger Cavatelli.  The potential mother-in-law wants to know whether or not her daughter-in-law to be can make Cavatelli. I had to laugh at that since I am now married 26 years  without having mastered that skill:) 

I pulled up on YouTube, to see first hand, how they make Cavatelli and then we decided to try it that night for supper.  It was fun to make but it took way too long, even with 4 of us doing the work.  In the end the kids had to milk cows so mom and I finished up the pasta.  Nonna was not that pleased with how they looked before we cooked them, so when everyone loved them, I think she was surprised.  Around here, I keep telling her nothing goes to waste.  I should note that if you want to know how many cups of flour you need for your particular family size you can figure around 1 cup of flour per person.

Basically, you only use water, unbleached flour and salt to make good Cavatelli.  We used 9 cups of flour for this meal.  After dumping the flour on the kitchen table, dusting it with salt and making a hole in the middle, we slowly added cup after cup of water until we had formed a nice elastic dough.  We worked it for a few minutes then covered the dough letting it rest for 15 minutes.  Next the small balls of the dough were rolled into long “snake” shapes and flattened with a rolling-pin. Then, we cut small pieces and used two fingers to shape them by rolling them with two fingers towards us then quickly flicking them the other way.  The process is not easy to explain, but if your are interested in making this check on Youtube by plugging in Cavatelli.  Seeing it done makes it much easier.

I made up a quick sauce to use on the Cavatelli. 

It consisted of:

Browning the olive oil and garlic very lightly, steaming in my pressure cooker the broccoli until just barely cooked, taking the green juice from the pot and adding it to the cooled oil mix, approximately 2 cups.  Then I added my frozen sweet Italian basil, salt, pepper and more garlic in the form of powder.  This was boiled and then turned off.  Next, in went the broccoli.  That’s it.  This sauce tastes delicious on any kind of pasta by the way so give it a try. The amounts are not that important, only the way the fragrance of the sauce is in the kitchen.  I also use this exactly the same way with Asparagus.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, but the very same evening I made up two Eggplant Parmesan pans.  I lost a bet with mom though, so sure was I that the family would eat both trays, only I underestimated how “heavy” the Cavatelli was.  We barely ate one tray of the parmesan, serving 12 people. 

The garden produced a bumper crop of eggplant this year so we  fried them up and froze them to be made later into this particular dish.  That is a very big job but well worth the effort to be eating so well all winter.  Below is the photo of the two trays we made.   Both are topped with our own Mozzarella Cheese. 

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~Pizza Cookoff~

Posted on December 7, 2011 by Callens Honey Farm

 
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If any of you are lucky enough to have a grandparent living with you, you can probably appreciate all the fun that comes along with having that extra hand. Mom, Nonna, is here until December 29, and I already feel sad thinking of her leaving so soon. I try not to think of it.  She is so much fun to have around and can run circles around me. She’s not afraid to work and mom can cook up a storm without any effort at all. We are having a blast and I feel sorry for my siblings back East who are going to miss having her there for Christmas. On the other hand, it is I who have been deprived of my mom at Christmas for 26 years, so I think I deserve this very special year:)  I’m glad God gave us family to share in all the good times; what a blessing.  I hope you all appreciate your family and loved ones as well!

Below are the contestants of the fun pizza cookoff we held last weekend.  It was a real eye opener seeing how competitive some of us were.  I tried to butter up the judge with a hug and a kiss but that did not work in my favor.  The judge was Fred who very carefully tested the four pizza’s and spoke highly of each one.   He did not know before hand who made which pizza, so it was all fair. 

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Fred, armed with a glass of vino, taste tested each pizza and gave us a run down on what was good and unique about each recipe. Frenchy’s crust, for example, was thick and puffy, with plenty of parmesan cheese,  while Nonna and the twins pizza, topped with Stacker peppers was delicious, a brand new topping idea. My pizza had a good variety of veggies and Peters had just the right mixture of eggplant and pepperoni. In the end, Nonna and the twins won and they sure didn’t let us forget it:) Would it be fair to mention that Luke chose my pizza later? Or was he just buttering up his mother-in-law? I see a pattern here.  Fred chose his mother-in-laws pizza while Luke chose mine.  Hmmmm.  It was fun and the food and wine was great. 


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Below is a family photo of us at Thanksgiving with Nonna in the middle proudly displaying two of her four great-grandchildren. The two extra kids belong to my brother Joe, Vincent and Victoria Petruccelli.  More family time together; we always seem to come up with something fun to do. 

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~53 Ducks In Our Freezer~

Posted on December 4, 2011 by Callens Honey Farm

Finally, the ducks are packed in nice clean bags in our deep freezers. The kids kept 22 back for next year, I might add, against my will.  I’m not a huge fan of feathers and feathers they leave everywhere they go. Hopefully, they won’t multiply as quickly next spring. It’s not only the feathers that bother me, but the constant quacking sound they make.  I think they are even more annoying than guinea fowl.  During hunting season, one of our friends was kept awake out in his camper by their constant uproar and he jokingly threatened that he  was about ready to shoot them.  With those few negatives though, one can’t overlook the positive aspect of having ducks and that is how good they taste when cooked very slowly in Sweet Baby Ray Barbecue Sauce.  Simply Divine is the only way to describe their flavor.

We took the easy route this year and decided to skin them all, avoiding the hot water dipping and feather plucking method which takes forever.  Duck feathers repel even the highest possible hot water temperatures. It was quite warm in the butcher shop and not all that unpleasant of a task.  Especially with Nonna and my very lovely niece, Victoria, hanging around making us laugh.  It took us two days to complete the job, but they were not whole days, meaning we did them in the afternoon two days in a row.

The ducks are not very meaty and it takes 3 ducks to feed our family, along with a few other family guests, and still have a little bit left over.  If given the choice, I favor the flavor and texture of our meat birds which we also put into the freezer last week. 

I should also say here that the deer meat harvested a few week ago is delicious as well.  Most can’t tell the difference; I kid you not.  Our deer in Minnesota are corn-fed, thanks to the local grain farmers, and they taste very similar to beef.  Nothing like the deer I remember back in PA growing up.  Mom always had to cook them in Pizziaola sauce, just to hide the gamey flavor:)  We have 7 in the freezer, some in the form of jerky and others in steaks and burger form. 

We’re going into the long winter with a great variety of meats and home canned goods.  It’s a good feeling knowing that, especially since groceries seem to be getting more and more expensive.

 

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