Twin Oaks Farm - Day 9

Another long day on the farm. I left Tallahassee this morning at 6:00 am and drove the 99 miles to the farm arriving at 7:00, allowing for a 1 hour time change. We start right in with the usual morning feeding and duck egg collection and directly afterwords I go straight to egg cleaning. Renee went to the market on Saturday so there are the eggs from Saturday and Sunday in the refrigerator and this mornings duck eggs. Starting at 9:30 am it takes right up to noon to get them all clean, then we sit down for a brief lunch. The new activity for the day is going to be making preserves. A couple of days ago Renee picked three bushels of Mandarin Oranges from the trees on the property and today we are going to peel them and prepare for making preserves. All day today she is back and forth on the phone between the jar sales people and some Florida state official, since she is operating a farm and making food for sale she is exempt from the sales tax on the jars but she has to get this through to both the jar sales person and the state official. While waiting for her to finish up that conversation I decide to start peeling the fruit. When she is finally off the phone and walks into the commercial kitchen she see's what I'm doing and tells me I have it all wrong. She picks up a veggie peeler and shows me how she just wants the very outside skin of the orange peel, not the white part, just a paper thin layer of the outer skin of the orange. This is where the oil is that will somehow be used to make the preserves. So we peel about 75% of the oranges and then set aside the peelings. She runs them through a food processor and turns them into a wet paste and places it all in ziploc baggies for storage in the fridge until we need them later. Then we proceed to remove the remaining peel from the meat of the oranges and put them in buckets for use later on the compost pile. The meat of the oranges then get sliced in half so they start to drain the juice and then placed in two large pots over the stove to be cooked down. The commercial kitchen smells like one giant mandarin orange and while I'm cleaning up I find two oranges that escaped the peeling process, so I quickly peel and consume, mmmmm they taste great after those few hours of being tempted by all the odor. Finally at 7:00 pm we stop for the day and Renee prepares a dinner of leftover mashed potatoes from her Thanksgiving dinner and some chicken with mushroom sauce gravy but sans the mushrooms. The dinner is great and afterwards she moves on to the office to finish up some important paperwork and I put the table dishes in the dishwasher and then wash the big pots and pans by hand. At 8:30 I'm heading up the stairs for a shower, another long day on the farm.