Happy New Year!

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With the Holiday Season fully upon us, this will be the last and probably the shortest blog entry of this past year.

We'd like to start by wishing all of our readers a very happy and prosperous New Year.

For us, this week our time was well spent with family and our special Christmas dinner. This was a time where the "farmers" became cooks and for once we began experimenting with our traditional holiday feast. We produced our own chocolate truffles, made our traditional chestnut cakes (but altered its icing from chocolate to mocha), and we replaced our stuffed goose with 2 large ducks. We even made our own Goujeres (a French cheese puff pastry).

From the fields to the kitchen...making a Cognac flavoured Ganache

The ducks proved to be a success; not only were they much meatier than the typical goose, but the meat was superbly tender. We bought them from our local supplier Lakeland and we were so pleased we're likely going to use duck for future special dinners at home.

Superb ducks from Lakeland Meats

In fact, everything we did tackle seems to have worked out. It did give us the wild idea to perhaps eventually produce a Ridge Berry Farm book of recipes (from cooking to foraging, canning and fermentation). We still have to perfect a few things but this may turn out to be an exciting project (of course when we have the time).

At the Tea Room, this was also the time to host one last holiday party. For this family, we used our space to provide an extensive buffet.

One extensive buffet for one last private party for 2014.

Hosting these events, we have developed again some interesting recipes. There is one in particular that seems to have had great success: our ham. We decided to glaze it with a combination of our very own Maple and Birch syrups. It is amazing how the ham will absorb the flavours (particularly Birch) and we have had rave feedback.

Of course with the very mild weather this week, we could not be kept off the farm. We decided to complete one last row of Kiwi trellises. We're really happy now that we've almost contained a quarter of our "feral" kiwis.

With the warm climate of the week, we could not be kept off the land.

As the year is now at an end, we look forward to report to our readers on a lot more discoveries for 2015. So we'll close this blog entry and 2014 with a quick picture of our farm during one of the recent snow storms.

The farm in all its Winter splendour