Cajeta-Mania!!!

I made cajeta over the weekend.
The buttery, caramal-y, awesome-y decadent goodness of cajeta must be experienced...it just can't be explained!
Wikipedia tries.

Check this out:

Oozy, gooey, yummy deliciousness in a homemade caramel sauce!
Drizzle it on cinnamon buns, over oatmeal or fruit, a little drizzled in yogurt or your morning cup of coffee...over ice cream, over a slice of cake...it is AMAZING!!!

The recipe is simple enough.
1 gallon of goats milk (unpasteurized, please!)
1 vanilla bean (broken and halved lengthwise) or 1 tablespoon real vanilla extract
4 cups white cane sugar OR brown grated sugar (the hard sugar cones you get at Mexican grocers)
1 teaspoon of baking soda (to prevent foaming)
2/3 cup water
Stir that all together and heat until simmering. DO NOT STIR IT AGAIN! (If you do, you *break* the mixture and it will not process properly)
Now walk away. Don't stir it, don't even think about it...for at least 10 hours. That's right, it has to simmer UNDISTURBED for 10 to 12 HOURS.
After around 10 hours, you can look at it. If it has cooked down well, the simmering should still be going on, but the bubbles should be breaking slower...you should see that it has turned to caramel.
My stove is kinda slow, so I simmered mine for 12 hours.
Do a spoon and saucer test.
Dip a spoon into the simmering mixture and watch how it sheets and drips off the spoon. Is it thick and drips slow?
Put a spoonful on a saucer and let it cool for 15 minutes. It should thicken even more when it is cool.
Taste it. Is the texture right? (The flavor will be awesome!)
If everything seems right, pour into canning jars and put on lids and let cool.
If you used actual vanilla bean and not extract, pour through a sieve to catch the bean pieces.

Time consuming, yes. Worth it? OH YES!
My 1 gallon of goats milk made 2 quarts of cajeta.
I gave some to my neighbor (she is Mexican) to get an unbiased opinion. Actually, I figured she would be most critical because her mother used to make cajeta for special holidays, etc.
She LOVED it! Said it was just as good as her mother's!
Now THAT'S a compliment!

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The cactus flowers are still in bloom here...finally getting the hang of the camera...

The whole cactus (and it is a large one) should be an explosion of hot pink flowers by the end of the week or so...will try to get some more pictures when it hits peak bloomage!
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STILL no rain here! (I think it's 115 days now!)
Lost a hell of a lot of my garden due to dust storms, heat and the absolute dryness, even though I am watering them nightly.
A dry warm wind blows even at night here.I am thinking I need to mulch like crazy and maybe water once after dark and then again right before sunrise. (Hey, I am already up then anyway!)

I am going to try to replant some this week...maybe if I continuously plant, some of my plants will make it through!

Holiday Weekend

Memorial Day looms dead ahead and the fella has a five day weekend (WOOO-HOOOO!). I am letting him sleep in (as well as the Girl), BUT there are some major things that need doing that I will require their assistance on.
The Boy is currently away from home, so he isn't included in the festivities.
First things first...
We have a dryer. It was here when I arrived, so I take no blame for it. It doesn't work anyway, so all it is doing is taking up valuable floor space in the laundry room. My plan is to get it moved out of there and into the shed (we have a storage shed), so we can possibly find a good used apartment sized refrigerator to put in that spot. It will prove invaluable for the goat milk, cheese and egg overflow for our regular refrigerator.
Ugh...the storage shed. We sooooo need to clean that out! Might as well put that on the list of "to-do" things as well.
I also plan on us cleaning up the yard today.
The wind blows so much here. Even if I pick up every day all the stuff that blows into the yard, I wake up with more stuff to pick up! I also want to trim some dead branches off the few trees in the yard, just to make them look a bit neater.
Planning on working on my raised bed gardens as well. Going to plant some more seeds and hope for the best. This super dry weather/climate, is wreaking havoc on my seedlings, so I try to keep seeds started to fill in where my seedlings perish. I water, I use manure tea, I try to shelter my poor seedlings with mulch, etc., but I am still having about a 50% die-off. I thought it was just me and my inexperience at desert gardening, but I talked to a few gardening neighbors and they told me 50% was actually pretty good! Most of them confess to a 70% or so die-off, despite their best efforts!

I am struggling with the camera...I got some stupid virus n my computer and had to reboot and reset so many things and use anti-virus measures just to get my system back to some semblance of normality. Then I tried to upload some pictures I took of the gorgeous cactus flowers in my yard...and....nothing. I swear I pushed all the right buttons, but nothing happens! So, I will work on that today, too, and hopefully you'll get to see some pictures of bright pink flowering cactus!

106 and counting....

It has been 106 days since El Paso has gotten rain.
Gardens require daily watering.
Animals are coming down out of the mountains in their desperation for water and food. Last week a mountain lion was shot in town at a car wash.
Coyotes are wandering our neighborhood almost every night. The goats get hysterical, of course, when they smell or hear them, so I frequently find myself getting out of bed in the wee hours to check on our animals.
Two nights ago, I saw a large male coyote trying to get over the fence into the yard.
One nerve-wracking thing is that they have found many of the coyotes in this area are actually cross bred with Mexican wolves (a smaller variety than a timber wolf) which makes them less fearful and more aggressive.
The large male that was trying to scale our fence was definitely not fearful of me. He stared right at me and didn't run (okay, he loped) until after our dogs went after him!
The county has a bounty on coyotes and I wish I could have shot that coyote! There were 5 or 6 other coyotes with him, so I suppose that's his pack.
They were certainly interested in our goats and the chickens! Folks that live further out than we do have told me that coyotes have been making forays into their yards and chicken coops, etc.
A lot of small pets have come up missing recently, too. Cats, small dogs, that sort of thing. Our dogs are larger and they sleep inside (yet another reason to properly house train pets!), but they will wake us up if they hear a noise outside.
The county is also reminding people to have their dogs shots (rabies especially) up-to-date.  I suspect, that with as many wild animals coming down from the mountains, there may be an upswing in rabies in our area.
Coyotes and other predators can spread other diseases besides rabies, too. So, a darn good reason for keeping the shots for your dogs and cats that wander outside up to date!
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I do hope it rains soon.  I am watering my little box gardens faithfully, but the absolute complete dryness beyond dryness is not treating them well. I despair over my tomato plants and I am afraid my cabbage and bok choy may not make it.
Hay prices have sky-rocketed around here.We give the goats alfalfa and the fella was able to get 20 bales a couple of weeks ago and he is trying to find 20 more bales, but people are holding on to what they have pretty tightly. Several local small farm type folks are thinking of driving to New Mexico or even Arizona to get a good sized load at good prices. He looked into prices in central Texas and east Texas, but the prices there are almost as bad as they are here.New Mexico is only two miles away from us, so the trip to get hay from there would be faster and closer.
In the meantime, I have heard from family and friends back East that the rain there has totally bogged down all the fields and farmers have still not gotten all the hay fields planted. In past years it would be mid-June when they got their first cutting!
 Gardens are a bit water-logged for those folks, too. One friend back east said she has had to start over on her tomato and pepper plants as roots have rotted from her garden being inundated with so much rain.
I guess all we can  hope for is good fall gardens at this point!