You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2009.
My family came over for dinner last night – for my mom’s birthday. In honor of her birthday, we cooked up the quail. We used this recipe. Bacon-wrapped quail stuffed with goat cheese. Does it get any better than that?
This is how you make quails extra nommable!
Ready to go into the oven...
Out of the oven...I'm so proud!
Here's what our dinner plates looked like.
So that’s what you can do with your processed quails.
We also started getting eggs regularly yesterday, so we fried up a few for appetizers.
Here's a man-hand for comparison. They taste really good.
Suburban sustainability – starting to see the pay-off!
We processed some of our extra male quails last night. It’s my mother’s birthday this weekend, so they’ll make a great part of bday dinner. I won’t say it wasn’t difficult, especially given that I love animals, but I feel if you’re going to eat meat, might as well face up to the ugly side.
This is the method that we used.
Turn back now if you don't want to see birds turned into nommables!
I’m learning some more about the quails. We removed all of the males, and then we dumped the biggest male back out into the pen. Quiet so far. I think we have about 2 unusually loud quails. Ideally, they’re only supposed to crow 2-3 times a day, and it shouldn’t be that loud. From observation, the rest of the males don’t crow as loudly or as often. So now we’re considering breeding for quietness as well as size.
In other news, I went out there this afternoon, peeked into the shelter, aaaaaand, WE GOT OUR FIRST EGG! My fiance and I totally high-fived over it. For those of you keeping track, that’s seven weeks to the day from hatch day (only one hatched a day before, so I count Thurs as hatch day).
It's so little, it barely fits in the quail egg carton! Little baby egg!
Removing some of the males has really helped. We have two males and nine females outside right now. I’d heard the male crowing described as the loudness of a cat’s meow, but I’d really put it at somewhere between meowing and the barking of a small dog. They seem to get into fits of crowing 2-3 times, and then quieting for 20 minutes-an hour.
This would normally be ok, except for two things. One, our neighborhood is very very quiet. It’s one of the things I noticed when we were looking at houses. Like a graveyard. Two, I like to sleep with the window open and I am a light sleeper. No one else has complained, but it bothers me.
We have a space between our cabinets in the garage. I think it’d make a great area for a pen. This will also allow me to do some selective breeding instead of relying on colony breeding.
Right now I’m in the process of designing an easy-to-construct, attractive pen with a couple features that will reduce mess and clean-up time. It will be divided into 2′x2′ sections (large enough for 4 quail each) where I can do some selective breeding. My little hobby will be to breed as large a coturnix quail as possible.
Hopefully this will also provide a nice reference for those people who would like to keep their quail indoors!
Coming soon…more natural home cleaning solutions. We are also working on a larger project – brewing our own sake!
The elder group of quails is six weeks old, and they’ve started to crow. At first, it was cute and little. It’s very “wild bird” sounding.
This morning I woke up at 5AM to A LOT of loud crowing. We had our windows open, and I’m sure this exacerbated the problem, but the weather is so nice it seems a shame to keep them closed. Covering the hutch seemed to work, but I am not pleased with this development.
I’ve put four males into a cage in the garage (it has windows, no worries), so we’ll see if that quiets down the crowing outside. Less males to more females means less crowing – or so I’ve been told. I previously had a 1:1 ratio. Ideally you should have 1 male to 3-5 females.
Granted, the crowing is no louder than a dog barking or a cat fight…but who wants to hear that at 5AM?
I’ll keep you posted!
Things have progressed quickly over this past month. I’ve got seven new quail babies, the 4-week-olds have been moved into their outdoor enclosure, and we’ve planted our seedlings in the garden. I’m very satisfied with what we’ve accomplished.
GARDEN
We grew all of these plants from seeds. MUCH cheaper than buying a seedling at the store. And you can get that wonderful smug feeling that you did it from start to finish =D
Green Zebra tomato plant
Bok Choy plant. I already want to eat them.
Butternut squash
Zucchini and Cucumber
Strawberries, so yum!
Our garden (I'm standing at the gate)
QUAILS
We moved them outside when they were 3 weeks old. They’re doing really well and are getting bigger every day!
The hutch - we put them all in the upper section.
Quails venturing out of the shelter.
Quails snacking on some weeds! They're great little garbage disposals =)
I’ll post another update in a month or so. Thanks for reading!
Background: I looooove paneer. It’s not easy to find where I live. I hate going grocery shopping, and I especially hate going to a specific store only to buy 1-2 items.
Paneer is a type of cheese, used in several Indian recipes (paneer tikka masal, saag paneer, etc.). It is very very tasty and is very high in protein. Here’s a recipe.
INGREDIENTS:
9 cups milk (use whole milk)
1 1/4 tbsp salt
1/4 cups lemon juice
Lemon juice, salt, and whole milk. It's very simple.
Heat the milk to boiling – either on the stove or in the microwave. Add the 1/4 cup lemon juice and turn off the heat.
Curds will form.
Put four layers of cheesecloth in a colander. Pour the mixture through this. Let it sit and drain.
Gather up the cheesecloth into a purse. Tie this over a pot or over the sink and allow it to drain at room temperature for an hour.
Unfold the cheesecloth, reshape into a rectangle, and refold.
Put paneer in between two plates, and weigh down with something heavy. Let this sit here for 1.5 hours, re-tightening the cheesecloth every 30 minutes.
Take it out when it’s done, and store it in an airtight container. Cut into cubes when cooking for use in stir fry or other dishes. Yum!
TIME INVESTMENT: Approximately 3 hours total from start to finish. Active time runs about 15-20 minutes. Very simple to make, and I will be doing this again!
