Grilling Burgers

We are cattle farmers and we raise our own beef for meat. So we through out the year we eat a lot of been and a good amount of it is in the form of hamburgers. During planting season and harvest season we eat a lot of burgers cause they are easy to make and take to the field.

Usually these burgers are pan fired. I'm pretty sure Caleb never gets sick of a pan fried burger, but I sure do. If I have the time to do I will usually fire up the grill and cook them on there instead cause they are soo much better when they are cooked on a grill.

I know there are some people out there who won't cook on anything but charcoal, well I'm not one of them. When it comes to grilling I use a gas grill. It's nothing fancy. Just one we got at Wal-Mart a few years ago.  I'm not against charcoal, in fact I love burgers cooked on charcoal, I just don't have the patience or usually the time to mess with it. Our neighbor Mr. Lyle makes the best burgers in the world and he uses charcoal...seeing how I will never be able to make burgers that good I don't even bother trying. lol

Now another fellow Kansas Cattle Woman, Debbie over at "Life On a Kansas Cattle Ranch", did a blog post about grilling burgers and I encourage you to check out her blog she does a really GREAT job talking about the ins and outs of grilling burgers.




















The size of group you are feeding will determine how much burger you need.  We have our meat packaged in 1 lb packages and I like making 1/3 lb burgers...

1/2 lb is too big

1/4 lb is too small

1/3 lb is just right!

I try and make the burgers as flat as I can across, cause I think they cook better this way.

Also I don't add anything to the patties when I'm making them. I will wait till I'm about ready to take them off the grill and then I will sprinkle some seasoning salt on them then.



















While you are making the patties it's best to have the grill already started and heated up cause you will want to put the patties on a hot, clean grill.

Once they are on there, they usually don't take to long to cook so you will want to stay close by. You will want the inside temperature to be 160 degrees, for the burger to be fully cooked.

Now one of  the major reasons I prefer grilled burgers to pan fried is they aren't greasy. All the grease and fat in the burger will cook away as you grill the burgers leaving you with a deliciously juicy burger.



















Once your burgers are cooked it's now time to enjoy them and top them with whatever sounds good to you. Hope ya get a chance to support a local cattle rancher and grill some hamburgers.

Enjoy,
Janet

Let the Planting Begin!!

It's that time of year again it's Christmas...

Wait, it's not Christmas, it's spring time...

Crazy woman!

Oh, did I saw Christmas, what I really meant to say was corn planting time. The red tractor and green planter confused me with Christmas.

And to be honest I am pretty sure Caleb is more excited about about planting corn than he ever is about anything I ever get him for Christmas. I guess I should start buying him seed corn for a present...lol

Anyways, it's true we have started planting corn. Our ground finally got dry enough to plant last Saturday afternoon, so let the madness begin!

They were calling for rain possibly on Tuesday morning, so bright and early Monday morning we thought we had better get started.

So all hands on deck when we start going...

Even the smallest hands on the farm had to do their part...

But their part was to sleep in the car seat while momma worked some ground.

Caleb and I got up at around 5:15 yesterday morning and headed out to the field.  I fed and changed Stinker before leaving the house and then put him in his car seat and away we went. He fell strait back to sleep and slept till just before we got relieved from our position.

He thought riding in the tractor was pretty cool. After our hired man took over for use we went and crawled into the planter tractor with Caleb and rode with him for a while. Chester thought it was pretty cool, but didn't like the fact that he couldn't touch any of the buttons or the steering wheel (auto-steer isn't as cool to little kids as it is to us big kids).

When we start going it's all hands on deck and it go like crazy time. This field isn't all that big, but we got 3 tractors running in it at one time.

Tractor 1 is field cultivating...or he's tilling all the weeds under.

Tractor 2 is smoothing everything back out so we can have a nice seed bed to plant in.

Tractor 3 is Caleb and he is planting. He really doesn't like to share the planter with anyone. He's kind of a planter hog..lol

Here's little man and I when we were taking dinner (aka Lunch) to Caleb in the field.

If I look tired, well that's because I am! 5 am came early and I only got to have a little bit of coffee.

My job most of the day was to run around like a chicken with it's head cut off...aka be the gopher (or go-for) person.

One of the things I had to do was go to the John Deere dealership and pick up some parts. One of them was this little rubber strap that holds the seed box lid on. I'm pretty sure the guy helping me had never seen a planter, cause I had to show him in his picture what this was, and I need to get another part for the planter and he had no clue what I was talking about and even when I gave him the phone to talk to Caleb about the part it took awhile to get him lined out with what we were needing. Oh well at least we were able to get the parts we needed and get going. There was another lady there fetching parts for her husband and John Deere had it all messed up and their big planting tractor was down so they couldn't go, so it could have been much worse than a dumb service guy.

We were able to go all day and we made it over a lot of acres, which was GREAT!

We had the alarm set to get up and do it all again this morning, and at 4:50 am Chester wakes up and fusses a little, so I go in and put his pacifier in and that's when I hear some rain coming down. It wasn't enough to keep us from getting up to go so Caleb heads up and gets the planter ready to go and I stay and sleep another 30 minutes then I got up and got Chester ready to go and then it started to rain again and this time it was enough to keep us out of the field. So I took Chester back in and put him in back in bed. That's how it goes sometimes...lol

We really didn't get all that much rain so hopefully we will be able to go again here after while if we don't get anymore!

Later,

JP

Pullin' a Calf

I just realized I haven't posted once in the entire month of February...

It's a good thing I get an extra day this year! ;)

Well I could make all excuses why I haven't been on here, but the main reason is I haven't made time for it. I've been working on some other projects in my free time, but I thought I would drop in today and tell ya'll hi so you didn't think I had dropped off the edge of the planet.

Well Spring is coming and boy am I getting excited and getting ready to plant me some tatters!!!

Another thing that happens this time of the year is baby calves are being born here on our farm. Usually it goes on without a problem and we just show up to the pasture and find a new little one running around but sometimes the cow can have problems and we have to give some assistance.

We try to keep from doing this if at all possible. If we see a cow trying to have a calf, then we will usually give her a couple hours and if she hasn't made any progress then we will get her in the corral and pull the calf. If it's a heifer (a cow that hasn't had a baby before) then we will give them only an hour and if nothing has progressed we will get them in and pull the calf.

Well yesterday morning we had to do just that...

Caleb had been out feeding hay to the cows and saw one of our heifers trying to have a baby. He gave her about an hour and since there was no progress we got her in and pulled the calf.

First you have to get the OB Chains around the calf's feet.

Once you got that you hook the chains to the puller. The puller has a ratcheting cable and you gradually ratchet it back and pull the calf out.

Here in this picture above we had a problem...

When pulling with a puller you either want the cow laying on her side or standing up, so you can get the pullers on the correct position of her hips so you don't hurt her.

Finally after some some pushing around we finally got her to stay on her side so we could start pulling.

Caleb is sticking his hand in there to make sure the calf is coming out correctly and that the head doesn't get stuck backwards, cause that would mean big trouble for momma and baby.

And finally after some hard work (both by Caleb and Jeff and the momma Cow) the baby was out...

And alive!!

now once the calf was out Caleb, Jeff and I all worked hard to get the momma to stand up, cause the longer she stays down the harder it will be for her to get up. But finally after threatening to ride her she finally got up.

Baby was wide awake and doing fine. I love watching them right after they are born. They start moving around and try to figure out what just happened to them.

Fact: I never saw a cow give birth naturally until I was in college helping at the "Birthing Center" at the Ozark Empire Fair. I had been around cattle since I was in 1st Grade and we either pulled the calf or the calf was born when we got there. I'm pretty sure I haven't seen one since then either.

In another note...

Little man is growing like crazy! He is eating rice cereal now and almost 5 months old...

WOW time is sure flying!!

He is very much Daddy's helper. On this day we were out looking at the wheat and helping feed cattle.

He jabbers all the time and and has been able to roll over both ways for about a month now...

And if we could get our arms and legs to work together we would be crawling....YIKES!!!

With that I had better get going.

JP

All I Wanted was a Cup of Coffee

So I am not a one of those people that have to have a cup of coffee every morning. I really like coffee and but just make it every once in a while.

Well yesterday morning I decided I wanted to make some coffee. I had emptied the package the last time I had it, but I had since bought another package to replace it.  I had put it in my pantry for safe keeping...

Well I spent about 10 minutes looking through my pantry and still couldn't find it, but I don't know why...

It's not like my pantry was a mess or anything...lol

Well by now I wanted a cup of coffee really bad, so I made up my mind to do what I had been putting off for a long time and clean and reorganize my pantry.

My little helper just sat and watched as the madness began.

And then when it was all said and done this is what we had. A nice clean pantry.

This shelf became...

This shelf and...

This madness turned into...

This! Life is good!!

Oh and by the way about 30 seconds into this I found my coffee...lol But I decided to continue with my cleaning and boy am I glad I did!!

So not only did I get a cup of coffee but I also got a clean pantry.

Hope everyone has a great weekend and if any of you are in Wichita at the Farm Bureau Young Farmers and Ranchers Conference look me up. Caleb, Chester and I are headed that way for the weekend.

Lots of Love,

Janet

Sale Day

So back at the beginning of the month Caleb and I sold the calve that we had weaned back in the fall.

Of course Chester went a long with us, cause he goes every where with us and so far has done really good.

Some friends of ours who had a little girl back in November was talking about taking all the "first" pictures. They said they had gotten her picture of her first time going to church...

Well I try to do the first pictures, but I didn't think about doing the first time we went to church...

but hey, give me a break he was only 5 days old when we got there,

But we did get the first time we rode in a tractor and the first time we went to the sale barn. I try.

These pictures aren't of our calves in the sale ring, but when our calves sold, Chester decided to to start fussing and I had to take care of him and try and get him to go back to sleep.

He liked looking around and watching all the calves come through.

We did fall asleep on daddy's lap for a little bit, while we were waiting for our calves to get in there.

This picture just cracked me up...

As you can see we have mastered the art of blowing spit bubbles...lol

All in all we were very happy with how our calves sold and as always had a good time watching them sell.

JP