Triple Digits for Thanksgiving

This update marks our 100th post, since we moved life events from the Facebook news feed to a private blog. We appreciate the five regular followers keeping up with our goings on.
This will be a Thanksgiving food update. We are so blessed here at The Acre, fixing too much food is a problem not a lot of people have these days, and it's a fact not lost on us.
We start out with Cupcake's favorite dish, corn pudding.

The next favorite dish, sweet potato casserole

And real home made mac n cheese, not store bought Stouffer's with cheese sprinkled on top before you bake it. Don't laugh, people do it and call it home made (I laugh too when I hear about it)

There has to be deviled eggs, and we are fortunate enough to have fresh from the chicken butt eggs. They really make a difference.

And of course, pumpkin pie. From scratch, we even used the jar of canned pumpkin from our patch this season.

And fresh eggs

Big Man's from scratch pie crust

Big Man whipped up some mashed potatoes, fresh dug from Pops garden, and made in cast iron pots.

Fresh home made cranberry sauce

And the main course, fried turkey. Cupcake won't have it any other way now.

There is a cast iron skillet of dressing behind the bird. Kattie Grace made that for us this year.
We're looking forward to many nights of leftovers.
K&K

Let's Get Small

Rhulenbarb will probably get the reference? But seriously, we have a short update this week. Both Big Man and Cupcake have fought off the first cold of the season this week, so the week went by kind of quick.
On a cold recovery note, nothing is better than chicken noodle soup, and it just so happened we had a lot of chicken meat left over from the smoked chicken roaster from last week. Big Man put it to good use.

And you really need a few home made dinner rolls to go along with your soup.

We found this recipe for honey glazed rolls, and they really turned out well. We will be making these again soon.
We found a pack of chicken wings during the week, so we moved chicken wing day to Wednesday, it has a W kind of ring to it anyway. We thought the spicy sauce might help sweat the cold out of us. It sure didn't hurt any.

We started our smelly pot of seasonal smells this week. We started putting a pot of oranges, cloves and cranberries on the stove.

On a humor note, we share Fraidy Mutt.
Every Saturday we fix buttermilk pancakes, and the first six small ones we make to season the griddle. We always keep them for the dog, and she looks forward to Saturday as much as we do. Now on Saturday mornings we ask her "what day is it?" and she goes nuts. This Saturday we noticed she was standing at the entrance to the kitchen, drooling and licking her lips, so we shot a quick video of her.

We are gearing up for the biggest eating day of the year. And y'all know we eat pretty good around The Acre to start with, so next update will probably be food related.
Fried turkey and corn pudding to come.
K&K

It's A Dog's Life

It's turned cold here at The Acre, and as we welcome cold weather and snow, we have to make adjustments for critters. Heated water bowls for the birds were put out and plugged in, we got caught flat footed one morning and had frozen water for the birds, and that just won''t do. The other noticeable change is Fraidy Mutt. She has been given the executive key to the mansion early, and she seems to be adapting OK with it.

She enjoys all the cooking that goes on.
Before we get to the cooking, we start with canning. This week Big Man helped saw up some downed trees, and loaded up a truck load of smoker wood with help from the family. But, working up a sweat when it's cold out gave Big Man his first cold of the season. So this week was inside stuff. We have two large buckets full of potatoes, so first order of business was getting them canned.

 Twenty four quarts of potatoes from one bucket, and five quarts of collard greens to round out the second batch of jars in the canner.  We also did another batch of cranberry sauce, nine more pints of that on the shelves this week.

We are sure somebody out there is saying "nobody eats that much cranberry sauce" but we do. We go through about one pint a week, so we put up as many jars as we can while they are in season.
We also put up three quarts of deer meat this week. Most of Jake's deer went to ground burger meat, but we had enough leg meat to do this. Here is three more days of meat, when the zombies come.

This week in food was a pretty good one too. We made another home made pineapple and ham pizza from scratch, and it turned out great.

Cupcake hit on the idea to put cranberry sauce on top, and it really set off the pineapple in the pizza. On second thought, we better can more sauce.
One night we had a simple meal of brats. But, we used the Scottish beer left over from making the mustard last week to boil the brats in. Add the home made mustard, and a big scoop of our home made squash relish from this summer, and we had a feast off a simple idea.

We also smoked a chicken for Thor's Day smoker meat. We have had really good luck finding the whole roasters (yes, they come whole for those who don't know) and it feeds us several times after smoke day, as we will get to at the end.

 We included a shot of the smoker working on the chicken, because it is an art to wood fire smokers getting it to smoke right. As you can see from the picture, there is only a whisp of smoke coming from the exhaust. It's magic when it all comes together.

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Big Man whipped up a peach cobbler, and a batch of collard greens fresh from the garden to go along with the chicken.

All in cast iron, or course.
And with the leftover chicken meat, we have a big batch of homemade chicken noodle soup on the stove while we write this entry. We use the chicken bones, boil them down and can the stock for just such an occasion.

Walmart  conspired against us this grocery night, and did not have one single pack of chicken wings for sale, so we stopped at Wades, and they too joined in the conspiracy to end Chicken Wing Sunday. So Cupcake made her world famous baked spaghetti, and nobody complained.
K&K

Well, We Movin on Up

We moved on up in the garden department this week. Baked some cake and pizza, and added to the zombie prep with meat and potatoes.
First off, we baked another apple cake.

 

We found some of our favorite apples this week, and we had another bag of black walnuts cracked out. 

 We made another home made pizza this week. This one was simple, and probably the best one yet. Pineapple ham pizza. We started out with from scratch dough...

Then rolled it out over the cast iron pizza pan (if you're not cooking with cast iron, why not?)

Add toppings along with our home made pizza sauce and bake

And we grilled up some salmon fillets one night. We used Cupcake's herb garden for rosemary, oregano and basil.

Our next big meal was Thor's day smoked meat. Back to ribs this week, with fresh from the garden cheesy potatoes and corn bread in bacon grease (again, in cast iron).

And as promised, we made another batch of mustard this week. We could not find the dark Spaten beer we wanted to use (thanks Kroger, for discontinue) so we went Scottish. It rocks the mustard.

One last food related item, dead eye Jake put down a nine point buck this week. So expect some canned deer meat pics in next weeks blog. But for now, we have tenderloin gravy and eggs, which is the tradition around The Acre the weekend after a kill.

Thin sliced tenderloin with homemade butter (in cast iron)

Tenderloin and fresh from the chicken butt, eggs (in cast iron)

And the "moving on up" part of the title, we expanded the garden for next spring. There was a large flat area of the side yard that we kept mowed, and it looks pretty from the road and all, but you can't eat grass. So we've decided to let the strawberries overtake the old garden, turn it into a fruit orchard, and move the garden proper to the flat part. Pop's came over and did the ground breaking Saturday, after we dug his potatoes.

It's pretty, but ya can't eat it

We have easily doubled the size of our garden, and we are planning on even more canned goodies next year. Bring on the zombies, we're ready to hold out until Sgt. Abraham makes it to the "big brains" in DC to end the apocalypse.
This past week was also our one year wedding anniversary, and to celebrate, we ended our years long tradition of chicken wing Sunday with Rhulenbarb sausage dip Sunday.
K&K

SNOW!

For our two or three regular followers, you know we love us some snow here at The Acre. November jumped off with a white ground for us, and we were quite excited. Cupcake's snow dance paid off once again.

Still counts.
Mostly cooking related items this week, so lets get started with the new obsession here at The Acre. Apple cake. We made one last week, but we used pecans. This week Big Man whipped up a cake using fresh cracked black walnuts that we picked up a while back. Each time we let the dog out, we crack four nuts while she's doing her business. Before long, we have a bag full.

The Big Man then made his soon to be world famous, cream cheese icing for the cake. He claims he will take the recipe to the grave.

The next item was smoked meat. Chicken this week. We found a ten pound roaster on sale, so we smoked it up for dinner, on cake night.

Along with the fresh green beans from a couple weeks ago, we had a fine dinner. And since it was such a big bird, we had leftovers. And what's better to do with leftover smoked chicken? Chicken and dumplings.

And you have to have fresh bread with chicken and dumplings. We do, anyway. So we made a loaf of peasant bread, in cast iron, of course.

And while all the cooking was going on this week, we let Fraidy Mutt into the house. She helped taste test the food. She's helpful like that.

And next, we tried a new thing this week. Home made German style mustard.

We used Irish beer this week, but we are going to make another batch to can next week using German beer. We will see if it changes the taste.

And, we made another batch of cranberry sauce. Nine pints from three batches. We figured if we did this ever two weeks or so, we will be all set my new years for next year.

And last but not least, as we were picking up the Irish beer, Cupcake pointed to a large bottle of beer and said "that's what Outlaw calls you" so we picked up a bottle, just for nostalgia reasons.

We ended our week with chicken wing Sunday.
K&K