Jelly and Jablonskis

One of the themes we have around The Acre is..."everything works out like it's supposed to". We are going to start off this week with an example. Saturday morning we hit the garden and picked two baskets full of tomatoes. We brought them back to the house and canned them up, but we used every last empty jar in the house.
Since we've bought more cases of jars than we can remember, we thought our season was over and what we have on hand will have to do us this winter. Now granted, we've probably got enough stuff canned up to feed a heavy weapons platoon for an extended zombie apocalypse, but that's not really the point.
Just as we were primping for our big Saturday on the town, we got a message from the one and only Alphageek. He had two boxes of Mason jars he needed to find a home for. (Yeah baby, talk canning jars, that's hot). So after the long way around the barn, we wanted to thank the entire AG family who greeted us and made us feel like we were doing them a solid, when they were the ones balancing The Acre out.
P.S.
Sister Geek has a smoked BBQ date next trip up. So there's that.

These are a few of the jars we gave a good home to. And once we got them settled in and all washed up, we filled them with plum jelly. Some of them anyway, others are slated for jalapeno jelly early next week.

So here is the tomatoes we picked/canned just before the good turn.

Wing sauce. A few of you may have noticed we end our week with spicy chicken wings every Sunday? Well, this past weekend we used up the last of the on hand sauce, so a new batch was cooked up and canned.

One more empty jar went to our new obsession. Pickled eggs.

And last week we reported that Kattie Grace baked us a cake, but dead batteries kept us from sharing it with the world, so here is the cake.

A couple of quick food related pictures. First, the school house rolls are getting better on the presentation side.

And one afternoon Big Man was watching a cooking show that featured fried green tomatoes. They breaded theirs different than we do, so we ran out to the garden and grabbed a couple of our green tomatoes and tried it the TV way. This may be our new recipe.

For the odds and ends of this week, we picked the apples on our apple tree. Not a lot this year, but enough for a fried apple dish for Sunday breakfast, and high hopes for next years yield.

Our back deck cabbage plants are still doing well.

Our chickens still come running when it's feeding time.

Some even get a good seat, waiting for Big Man to show up with the scratch grain.

We've been throwing the grain into the woods behind the house instead of in the yard. We have learned that they find more bugs/worms in the woods while they are going after the grains. Our birds have become too spoiled to hunt on their own, so we trick them in to it. The layer feed consumption is way down, but egg production is holding steady. We might be getting the hang of this?

Our last item this week has been a long time coming. Big Man's last partner in the former life passed away a while back. T.Marc Colburn (expert witness, deceased) was a big part of the tail end of the police career, and Big Man was honored by his parents when they sent his detective badge to him. This week we honored T.Marc by hanging a shadow box with his badge in the "great room" for all to see.

We ended the week with wings.
 And a shot of Bushmills
K&K

Sauce and Syrup

Another busy week around The Acre as we prepare for a hard winter. All signs are once again pointing toward a lot of snow, so we are preparing for the worst.
Something we've always wanted to do is make a straight from the garden spaghetti sauce. The stars aligned this year, and all the ingredients did well and were ready to use this week.
We picked fresh tomatoes, peppers, jalapeno peppers, onions and garlic. Then we used fresh basil, oregano and rosemary from the herb garden on the deck. This is our best sauce ever.

It made 14 quarts (3.5 gallons) which makes us well set for a while.
Our next winter prep was corn. This is the first year we have had enough corn to can. We usually get enough to eat on, so we were anxious to can our first batch.

Our Concord grapes came in this week, and we made one more batch of jelly. We give most of our jelly away, so somebody is going to make out. Or a whole bunch of people will, more than likely.

There was food too. We smoked our first half of the brisket from last week.

We had schoolhouse rolls with the meal.

And some chocolate pie for dessert.

And speaking of smoker meat, we have some 'on the hoof' hanging around the yard lately.

We had our first pumpkin meal Saturday morning. Big Man has perfected pumpkin pancakes, but we saw a recipe for homemade pumpkin syrup. We made a batch during breakfast prep, and used it while it was still warm. We won't bother to tell you it's better than anything you can buy in stores.

Sunday morning, we made "Crazy Grannie's" favorite breakfast. Eggs, sausage gravy, biscuits and fried apples.

After Sunday breakfast dishes were all squared away, Kattie Grace asked if she could bake a cake. She made it from start to finish all by herself, so we're quite proud of her.

The cake turned out great, it did not fall at all. She even dyed the frosting blue and iced the cake herself. Our camera batteries gave out on us before publishing time, so you'll have to take our word for it. It rocked.
A couple of random pictures to end the post this week.  The cows with wings learned they could fly this week.

And we caught a pretty sunset we wanted to share.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

We Beat Our Meat

This title is exclusively for Richard Beamer, who seems to read the blog only if the title can be taken dirty.  Cupcake is the mastermind behind the title, so please refer all questions and comments her way.

But we did beat our meat this week. We found a whole brisket for under $35 dollars, so we prepped it for a date with the smoker next week.
In other food related items to report, we made more pie. Two at a time. As we said last week, Brother Kevin came out and ran some pipe for a sink, so we paid up with pie.

We had to make one for ourselves

We picked a fresh batch of collard greens, and slow cooked them for dinner. With a slice of brisket for flavor.

And since everything is better in cast iron, we bake our dinner rolls in it now.

We went "old school" country dinner one night, and had simple BLT's, with lettuce we picked from our planter boxes, and fresh from the vine tomatoes. If only there were feral hogs around The Acre, we'd have fresh kill bacon. Maybe someday?

Of course Cupcake needed some fried squash and fried green tomatoes.
Cupcake requested grits for breakfast one morning, and if we learned anything from "My Cousin Vinnie", no self respecting southerner eats instant grits.

We picked another basket of tomatoes from the garden, and canned them up within an hour of picking them. That will be some fresh eating when we're snowed in this winter.

We mentioned a couple of weeks ago, that "Team Flash" started laying for us. We get a couple eggs a day from the new girls, and the eggs are about half the size of a regular egg. Big Man has been using the TF eggs to make pickled eggs. We wait until we have a dozen, then make a quart of eggs. It takes at least a week for the pickle and vinegar to soak in the eggs, so a jar a week will keep a steady supply.

The project of the week was jelly. The foxgrapes came in this week, but we only picked one basket full. The last time they came in, we picked all we could get our hands on. We made jelly, wine, more jelly. We still have the wine, but we did eat all the jelly. Now we have more jelly.

Odds and ends for this week. We have broom corn

It has been coming up all over the place, so we guess the birds ate it last year, pooped the seeds out and here we go. If we could just teach them to poop in rows.
And speaking of birds, Big Man has trained them to come running when he puts out feed.

We set the guinea birds free to roam this week. They are still the most stupid birds on the planet. Big Man calls them "cows with wings". We're convinced they would starve to death, standing in a pile of feed.

But they didn't fly away when we let them out, and they went up in the hen house the first night along with the rest of the flock, so we'll call it a wash.
Our giant sunflowers are almost all bloomed.

And we got a picture of mother nature's tease. We've had thunderstorms blow all around us, but not a drop of rain did we get.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K