Quail Breasts with Mushrooms and Rice

Breasts from 12-14 quail- you could definitely use less, this made a good sized meal that could have probably fed 5 or 6 people.

1/2  a package of fresh mushrooms, sliced- put in as many as you like but I used about a half a 16 oz package. 
1 can cream of mushroom soup
a little red wine vinegar
Approx. 1/2 cup milk
salt and pepper
3 cups cooked rice 

Put your quail breasts in a frying pan with some oil or grease (I used bacon grease because we have a lot of it), add the sliced mushrooms, sprinkle with a little red wine vinegar, salt and pepper well. Let cook until quail breasts are done.  There should be liquid in the pan from the mushrooms. Add the cream of mushroom soup to this, stir, add enough milk to make it creamy. Add this to your already cooked rice and stir.

I am sure there are much better cooks out there than I am but this was excellent. Quail and mushrooms go together so well. Quite a nice change.

Quail Butchering

I am fairly sure that I have done a quail butchering post on here before but we'll do it again for those who are new and haven't read the whole blog. Remember those 19 quail I hatched not so long ago? They have been overdue for butchering but I had no freezer space. After looking at the freezer today I thought I could fit them in if I didn't leave them whole. Plus I have an idea for recipe for the breasts and I would like to try the legs fried.
Anyway, here are the quail.

We are a few short of 19 since we lost a few. I didn't count but I believe there were 15 or 16 in there.
Here is the new Mt. Dew killing cone.

Not much to it. Put the quails head through the hole and cut it off. Sounds bad but it is actually really quick (sharp knife necessary). It is a lot quicker to me than killing a chicken.
I lost the first quail that I killed. It didn't occur to me that the thrashing it did after I killed it would make it pop right out of the cone and Clone was waiting for that.

No way I could catch that cat.  I couldn't help it. I hated to lose the quail but I had to laugh at my own stupidity. Clone did not get another quail that's for sure. I made sure to hold them in the cone after that.
All in the bucket:

The good thing about quail is that you can take them inside after they are killed where you can do the rest.
I was not going to leave these whole so only needed to pluck the legs and I also plucked the breast just so I did not have to deal with feathers later. It is very easy to dry pluck quail. They don't need any scalding or anything like that.

No much else to it; skin the breast meat and cut off, cut off the legs and toss the rest, you basically have all the meat with the legs and breast. Put all the meat in ice water.

Let it rest in the frig for a couple of days, take out, do any extra cleaning and bag up for the freezer or eat.

Carrot Canning

I have two posts for you all today and I was going to do it all in one post but decided some people might want to see the carrot canning and not the quail butchering so I'll do it in two.
I didn't need any more carrots. I have plenty of baby carrots canned already but when I left the Club on Friday I was given a whole bunch of carrots and broccoli that the kids hadn't eaten. (Sorry pictures are still being done with the phone).

They know I have animals and they give me whatever is out of date or looking a bit off for me to feed to the animals. These however were perfectly good, they just wouldn't last through our week off. I did not give them to the animals. The broccoli I blanched and froze and it made two bags/meals for us. The carrots, however, were waiting for me this morning (when I remembered them). I could have saved myself some work and just canned them like they were but since I already had many jars of whole baby carrots, I decided to slice these.
I, of course, couldn't find the canning book that I usually use but I found my Ball Blue Book so all was well. Then I went looking for jars. I thought I had a bunch of pint jars but had to really look to find 9 of them to make a canner full.
There were a lot of carrots. My first pan didn't turn out to be big enough and I had to get another.

I'm not going to go through the whole method, you can read that in any canning book. I'll just say I hot packed them put them in my assorted jars and pressure canned them the 25 minutes.

There were still enough carrots left that I had to get a ziplock bag and freeze one bag.