If you have never had Moose meat you are missing out on something great, In “The Maine Woods”, Henry David Thoreau described its taste as, “like tender beef, with perhaps more flavor; sometimes like veal”. That is as close as a description of it as I will try. Moose meat is one of our family favorites and it just so happens when we moved to the new house I found some cleaning out the freezer. So today I am going to share one of our family recipes for Moose meat chili. I have made this with Deer meat as well and it tastes just as good.

Serves 6 -8

You will need the following ingredient.

4 tablespoons of olive oil or vegetable oil

1 ½ to 2 pounds of ground Moose meat

1 onion, chopped to your preference

4 cloves of garlic finely chopped

2 tablespoons of chili powder

1 tablespoon of dried oregano

2 teaspoons of ground cumin

½ teaspoon of ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon of allspice

1 can (15 ounces) crushed tomatoes

1 ½ cups of red wine

1 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoon of black pepper

12 dried Japone peppers, stems removed, broken up or whole

1. Place a large cast-iron skillet on medium-high head. You can use any type of skillet I just prefer cast iron to cook with. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and all of the Moose meat. You will cook the meat until it is no longer pink, this takes about 8 minutes. You will now transfer the meat to a large bowl and set it aside. Return the pot to the heat adding the other 2 tablespoons of olive oil and the chopped onions. You will cook the onions until they are soft which takes around 10 minutes, you will need to stir very often to keep them from burning. Add the garlic and cook for anther 1 minute or 2. (I am a firm believer that you never need to stick to a recipe 100% unless you have to. I was out of fresh and minced garlic so I improvised and substituted granulated garlic. Not exactly the same but it will work.)
2. With the garlic now getting warm it is time to add the chili powder, cumin, cinnamon, oregano, allspice and dried Japones peppers. You will cook for another minute stirring continuously. With most of the dried ingredient added it will start to gum up a little to the onions.
3. Now you will add the bowl of Moose meat back into the skillet also add the rest of the ingredient, the can of crushed tomatoes, wine, pepper and salt. Turn up the heat to bring everything to a boil. As a side note normally when you add dried Japone peppers you would soak them to rehydrate them, since we are now going to turn the heat down to low and simmer for 45 to 50 minutes this will rehydrate them as they cook. You will only need t stir it every so often to keep it from burning on the bottom.Grab your favorite beverage and enjoy.

I got an email from one of our first followers asking about the red wiggler worms. The worms are doing great. I read all about what needs to be done to take care of worms but I still made a bunch of rookie mistakes. I put too much food in too soon before the colony could really get going. I also didn’t have enough bedding in the bin so I ended up with fruit flies with the food not being buried deep enough. All in all things have turned out ok, so far. We’re still not settled into the house so with chaos still winning the battle I just really haven’t had too much time to think about the worms. I almost feel we started this blog a little too early as we are running around with our jobs, Andrea made a career change the day before we signed on the house. She loves her job even if it is less money in the short term. I promise I will do more posts on the worms soon. And thank you for the few emails we have received so far. Feel free to email us or comment on any post or both.

The title pretty much says it all. I absolutely hate moving with every ounce of my being. I really need to help out on fixing up the house we were renting from my father but this move will never end. I am sore tired, grumpy and there is never enough time in the day to get anything done. Yesterday for example I had planned on painting at the old house. Nope, didn’t happen. DirecTV was supposed to show up at 8:00am but, that didn’t happen until 12:30. So 4 ½ hours wasted at that point. I did get a little bit of stuff done around the house while I waited but I really needed to take the trailer to the old house to drop it off so it can be loaded with building supplies. The installer was a very nice guy but he also let me know when he got there that this was his last job as he had just quit. What should have been a nice easy install 1 hr max was not done until 5:30pm. I’m not sure if he was trying to milk a little extra pay out of the company or if he just was taking his time trying to do the job right, either way he was a nice guy but the time 9 ½ hours of my day that it took up could have been used for a lot of other things. Clothes seem to be the biggest animal we are fighting right now. We had clothes stored in the garage that were either stuff to sell in a garage sale or donate to a charity or they were spring / summer / fall / winter clothes that were out of season at the moment. We also had some that needed to be washed and heck even some that were clean. Well, it’s funny how things can get all intermingled when you move. We’re now going through all of the clothes to figure out what is what, who is who and so on and so forth. That’s of course complicated by the fact that the boys think any pile of clothes folded or otherwise not need to be tossed over their heads into the air. I’ve got to run but have yourself a Wicked Good Day and keep living the Wicked Good Life.

It’s pretty hard to kill a sourdough starter but it can be done if you are not careful. With the move one of the things I kind of forgot about was our sourdough starter. I did get a good loaf of bread out of it but alas it was tossed today. I will be starting a new one in the coming weeks and I will post pictures this time I promise.

Sorry about the break in posting. Since the 25th all we have really done is move and work on getting our old house ready to be sold. It’s taken a lot longer than I was hoping it would take but with Andrea having a hurt shoulder she is not able to lift a lot. Boxes are still everywhere but I am hoping to knock it all out over the next few weeks and have everything setup and in its new place. We’ve moved a few different times when we were living in Arizona and this will be our last move here in Maine but this time was by far the most difficult with a 2 year old and a 4 year old in the mix. We’ve had deer visiting us every few days and 2 different beavers running around n a few occasions. I have no clue where the beavers are coming and going to as the nearest stream is a good hike away and the two small farm ponds that are nearby show no sign of them living there. The sunrises and sunsets have been amazing. We still will not have the DirecTV installed for three more days, I’ve really enjoyed not having TV but the rest of the TV addicts in our house are in major withdrawal. It may still be a little bit of time before the regular posts star flowing but as of yet we don’t have a lot of readers that we know of anyhow so you’re not missing out. Take care to all and have a Wicked Good Day.

So far we have found at least 7 apple trees on the property.  Weldon is excited that he has one of the trees right outside his window so each day he will be able to look and watch them grow. He wants to put up a tent and wait under the apple tree so as soon as they are ripe he will be the first person to pick one. Still a few more months before those are ready but that’s ok.

Worms arrived on Thursday June 24^th in the afternoon. It took a day longer than it was supposed to and upon arrival there were a lot less worms than were advertised. It was supposed to be 2 lbs of worms if there was ¾ of a lb I was lucky. So far the worms are not very active at all. I’ve had 2 worms escape out the air hole I made for them. I will be putting screen over the holes after we finish moving everything, this is the part of moving that I hate, the packing and moving. The worms are safe at their new home, hanging out in the kitchen for right now; we’ll see where they end up. It will be great to have them composting our organic food matter for us, it’s a small thing but if everyone did it we would reduce the amount of trash we put into landfills by a lot and it makes excellent fertilizer for the garden.

It is official, we are now the proud owners of a 2600 square foot farm house built in 1908 on 9.6 acres of land. The closing itself only took 36 minutes. We signed our paperwork, picked up the boys and went to the new homestead. It has a majestic Maine beauty that is indescribable. Internet will not be hooked up until next Thursday so the blog won’t be that active until then.

I’ve been going to the new homestead almost every day for the past week. Either a short trip with the boys to explore the woods or mow some of the piles of grass I should just rake up. Not going inside the house because it isn’t ours yet. Today I forgot to bring the camera when I stopped by for a few minutes before work. I took the mower down onto the hidden lot and was mowing for about 5 minutes puttering along before I looked up and there was a doe white tail deer standing 30 feet away. She was a beauty standing in a patch of wild Maine strawberries that are just starting to come in. After a few minutes she went into the woods but I waited. After about 8 minutes she came back and she brought another doe with her. Two doe White tails about 60 feet away hanging out under one of our newly discovered apple trees, we’re up to 6 that we’ve found so far. One of them grazed on the shrubs the other stood watching me sit on the mower. It was extremely windy today, gusts up to 40 mph and I was down wind so they couldn’t smell me. I tried to take a pic with my cell phone, but that thing is a piece of junk. After a little while longer of grazing they both went into the woods. It was the first signs of wildlife other than a couple chipmunks that I’ve seen. Ya, birds and a few field mice but you know, real animals. It was a wicked good day in Maine. I can’t want to move in as I am so totally in love with this new home and the land around it.

I’ve been looking for weeks for a way to get these worms local but nobody I could find has them. All of the bait shops have nightcrawlers and other types of worms but no red wigglers. I could have gone to a local farmer and seen if I could go through their manure pile to see if I could find some but I figured this was cleaner and easier with all that is going on right now. So I pulled out the credit card and ordered them from gardeners.com.

Wikipedia says the following about these worms:

Eisenia fetida, known under various common names, including redworms, brandling worms, tiger worms and red wiggler worms, are a species of earthworm adapted to decaying organic material. They thrive in rotting vegetation, compost, and manure; they are epigeal. They are rarely found in soil, instead like Lumbricus rubellus they prefer conditions where other worms cannot survive. They are used for vermicomposting. They are native to Europe, but have been introduced (both intentionally and unintentionally) to every other continent except Antarctica, occasionally threatening native species.

From everything I have read these are hands down the best for composting. Nightcrawlers and other types of worms can be used but they are not as good. This is a big step for us and it will take time to build up a colony that is big enough to support what we need them to compost but we are on the right path. It’s all part of living the Wicked Good Life. I will post more on this subject when they arrive.