Black Rifle Barter

This week we brought back the barter system in a small way. Back in the day, when people said they were "going to town to do some trading" it meant they would take something they had, and trade it for something that they needed. Cash money played a very small roll in day to day life. We always say were are "going to town to do some trading" but it's mostly cash for goods. Leave it to our pal "Rhulenbarb" to offer up a true barter this week.
We had a bountiful week in blue eggs, and with the recent heavy snow and mud show, egg sales dropped off quite a bit. Our eggs began to pile up, so we asked Dave if he could help us out. He agreed, in exchange for a bag of "Black Rifle" coffee. Apparently Dave put some thought in to a future exchange, and we were thrilled to be a part of it.

We had one extraordinary day on the egg front this week. We gathered forty eggs in one day. That means every girl took a turn in the box. Usually they are every other day layers, but we guess since it's a leap year, they synced up for a blowout day.

While we were visiting with Rhulenbarb, we ran across the retired high chief of police from CPD, Gary Brumfield. He stopped and chatted a bit, we discussed all things retired police talk about, we talked about "The Outlaw", we all laughed. Good times.

Last week we promised a plant update surprise. We started a "grow" operation in the basement this year. We picked up a couple of LED grow lights that don't use quite as much juice as the old bulb type, and they certainly do not get as hot. We bought a couple of adjustable ropes to hang the lights from, and used existing holes in the ceiling to hang them from.

Prior to doing this, we used the sliding glass doors in the living room as our source of sunlight. It works really well for starting plants, but once they sprout and we transplant them into cups, we have fifty or so cups of dirt in the floor. That means Fraidy Mutt needs to get all up in their business, and knocks about half of them over. Water leaks out. We don't know why we never thought of this before. So to celebrate our new found operation, we replanted another 36 marigold plants, and another 36 ground cherry seeds. The first round of ground cherries didn't do so well, we only had about six sprout, so we try, try again. The marigolds did very well, we are excited for them because the birds leave them alone, and they repel pests and deer as well.

Some of you may remember Cupcake and her seed fetish from last fall? It's paying off big time now. We even started putting a handful in the chicken feeder, so the girls can get to spreading around some flowers in their day to day. We had a couple extra ropes from the grow light set up, and we used one to suspend the chicken feeder in the hen house.

We had the feeder on the ground, but the girls would always find a way to knock it over. So we put a large plastic trash can lid in the hen house, and put the feed directly in that, but the girls felt the need to scratch sawdust and straw into the lid, and we would lose more feed than the girls ate. NOW they can't kick anything in to it, and they can't knock it over. We rock.

And speaking of all things chicken, we started our breeding plan this weekend. We moved six of our brown egg layers into "Arkham" along with one of our blue roosters. Our plan is to hatch these eggs to produce olive colored eggers. We're sure we will mention the progress, we have three weeks until the Farmer's Almanac says it's the time to incubate eggs.

We had a vacancy in "Arkham" this week, because Penguin woke up dead one morning. We guess he was too far gone when we identified the problem? But it lead to a funny story.
Big Man came in the house and reported Penguin's passing, and Cupcake asked "was there anything wrong with him?""You mean other than he was dead?" "Yes"  "Nope, dead was pretty much the only issue today"  We would soooo make a better reality show than anything the Kartrashians are putting out to the sheeple, but our regular readers are the only ones who will ever know.
The remaining five guinea birds are still on patrol, and all seem healthy and happy.

Moving on to the food portion of our week, we used some of the smoked turkey from last week to make a batch of turkey salad. We enjoyed that for lunch most of last week. We had plenty of home made pickles to go in it.

We had Cupcake's new favorite meal, paprika chicken on Monday night.

Home made pizza on Tuesday

And we thawed out one of the three black heart cherry pies we made last year and froze. It was a little taste of spring. It won't be long until we're picking this years batch of fresh cherries, and we are counting down the days until we can.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Daytona and Batman Villains

This week was speed week at Daytona. In a prior life, it was the holiest of weeks. Big Man always took speed week off from work, to start with it was the only week he could get off because he was a velvet ass rookie on a shift of grizzled veteran police. But later he picked up the NASCAR bug, thanks to Badd Dewd.
Badd Dewd was a Dale Earnhardt fan, and pestered Big Man to join in watching. Not knowing anything about NASCAR, Big Man asked who the polar opposite of Dale Earnhardt would be. BD said Dale Jarrett drove the Ford sponsored car, so Big Man became a DJ fan just to have someone to root against the black 3 car. This was around 1996, DJ wasn't hitting on much but he seemed like a genuine guy, and Big Man had the pleasure of meeting him, and most of his family over the years.
The point of this story is one of the traditions of speed weeks, Big Man planted his tomato seeds on the day of the Daytona 500. By planting time, the plants were just the right size for setting out. This tradition continues even though DJ is retired and NASCAR holds no place in Big Man's life any longer, except the seed part. But as far as the title this week, DJ once drove the "Bat Mobile" in a race, and Big Man just happens to have a collectible from that race.

And for the villains part of the title, we lead off with "The Penguin"
We have a guinea bird with a twisted leg, he walks like The Penguin on Gotham, so Cupcake dubbed him with his name. Penguin is the slowest of the bunch obviously, but for the most part he has always did his own thing and everybody leaves him alone. This past week it appears that the group started picking on Penguin, not letting him eat. So we solitary sequestered Penguin in the unused coop that we have dubbed "Arkham" until he gets his strength back and can fend for himself again.

The second villain for the week is Harley Quinn. Since we are on a seed planting kick this week, we decided to start a batch of marigolds inside, and this batch is named Harlequin.

See what we did there?

When it came to Sunday and tomato seeds, we paced ourselves and only started 72 plants. We figure we can always plant more in the coming weeks, and Cupcake always picks up a couple dozen plants when we come across them in town on trading days. We actually have a plant surprise for the next update, so stay tuned.

We had another batch of snow this past week.

And snow makes us want to cook and eat. So, on to the food part.
First off, something new this week. Big Man saw a recipe for raspberry cinnamon rolls. We have a bag of frozen raspberries from last spring, it was a perfect storm of idea and free time.

Yeast prep for the dough

Home made dough, rolled and ready

Cut the dough, sprinkle with brown sugar

Nailed it

We will add this one to the "maybe" list for a repeat. The raspberry filling was a bit runny, probably because it was frozen. We may try it again when we can pick a batch of fresh berries. We will advise.
Next up, another dinner of paprika chicken. Cupcake says it's her new favorite.

Then for Thor's Day meat offering, we had a mini Thanksgiving. Smoked turkey, mashed potatoes and cornbread stuffing. Stuffing had turkey guts chopped up in it, and Cupcake loved it.

A couple of projects that were not food related. We made another batch of deodorant.

And our rhubarb plants have started to outgrow the peat pots, so we transplanted them to our cow poop planters that we picked up last fall. We've been dying to use them since we bought them.

And we ended the week with wings.
K&K

Valentimes 2016

This week ended with Valentimes Day. Being the die hard romantic he is, Big Man planned a special weekend, starting with a movie date with Cupcake. We went to see "Deadpool" at the local Imax theater. It was our first time at the Imax. We must be getting old, because we both walked away thinking the movie was WAY too loud. The big screen was nice, but going half deaf took away from the experience.
The movie itself was a hoot and a half, Cupcake had absolutely no nurd knowledge prior to marrying the Big Man. Now she can carry on a conversation about "Battlestar Galactica" "Iron Man" "Avengers" and all things "Green Arrow" and "Flash" related. But we digress.
"Deadpool" is a potty humor, extremely violent comic, and the movie held true to the comics. In our opinion, it blended back story and action very well. Cupcake says we have to go back to see it again, and we've never gone back to see a movie. Ever. Much less a nurd movie about a comic book.

Happy Valentines Day

Our two regular followers will remember we've been watching our guinea birds do a battle of wits with a hawk over the past couple of weeks. The guineas are really starting to pay off. Sunday morning we were getting started with our regular breakfast routine when Cupcake saw a stray dog in the back yard chasing the girls around. Before Big Man could grab the nearest assault rifle, she said "look at this". The guinea birds had surrounded the stray mutt, and had him backing up away from the hen house. Big Man stepped out and put a hot round between it's legs, which seemed to help get the dog's mind right. Problem solved, problem staying solved, thanks to the little watch birds and the Colt Firearm Company. We did see the hawk again this week too, but we still have not lost a chicken to it.

We left you last week prepping for Superbowl Sunday snacks. We start off the food related portion of the update where we left off last time. Cupcake made some pizza snack bites to go with the wings and chicken poppers. We also bought a little tub of Mrs. Wade's spinach dip. Not to be confused with Mr. Wade Wilson, seen above.

Big Man made another batch of paprika chicken this week. When we try a new recipe, standard operational procedure is to follow the recipe to the letter. If we like it, we make it again, only we make it our own. This week Big Man tinkered with the spices and put it over linguini noodles. It is now our recipe, and it rocks!

We had to have a buttermilk pie to go with it.

And we had steak night as our offering to Thor's Day this week. The picture really does not do justice to the meal, but we do what we can with the equipment on hand.

Fraidy Mutt looks forward to Thor's Day as much as we do. She comes unstuck when there is red meat on the menu. We tried to get a picture of her drooling, this is the best we could do.

It's not easy being a dog around The Acre.

One last food related follow up. We shared the huge blue egg from last week, this weekend we fixed it for Saturday pancake day. Cupcake likes her eggs over easy when she has pancakes, it was in fact a double yolker.

Fraidy Mutt got her pancakes this weekend too. So all is right with the world again.
A couple of non food related items, we got a dash of snow again. It didn't amount to anything, but it sure was pretty coming down.

'murica

We made another gallon of laundry detergent this week.

We upgraded our humidifier in the master bedroom. The first night we used it, Cupcake got up to check on something or other, and when she came back into the bedroom, she thought she encountered a ghost. It puts out quite a bit of mist, the first night it was almost a fog. Big Man had to break down and read the instructions on how to dial down the mist. It's not too bad now.

And on a neat kind of note, we shared our Dude's Drive In cup from Saturday night. We left the cups in the truck overnight. Cupcake went out to empty the trash and found the water had frozen solid in the cup, and water had climbed up the straw and out the top. We are really simple people, amused by really simple things.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Cupcake's Birthday Week

This past week it was Cupcake's birthday. We call it "Birthday Week" because the Big Man worked with a guy who started off with a birthday, then celebrated a birthday weekend, then a birthday week, which eventually lead to a birthday month. We settled on a birthday week for the title of the update but really it was just a special meal or two, some cheese, and we got back to the grind.
Cupcake found a recipe for a paprika chicken that looked good. Big Man printed out the recipe and went to work in the kitchen.

We start with soaking chicken thighs in egg batter

Fried, then baked

End results, paprika chicken

Peach cobbler, for our peach

We also went to Cupcake's favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner one night to celebrate, it's kind of our birthday jam.
After the birthday meal we did have one big night of pot roast.

Then we had kitchen drama. Saturday morning, Pop's had breakfast with all the cousins which left a hole in our regular Saturday routine. Cupcake said she would fix French toast for The Big Man instead of our regular pancake meal, giving BM a day off.

The French toast rocked, but Fraidy Mutt came unstuck. She always gets a handful of pancakes for Saturday breakfast, and even knows what day it is when you ask her. This Saturday she knew something was up, there was no mixer being worked, no smell of pancakes. We did fix her two pieces of French toast, and Big Man cut it into squares and played the toss game with her like it was pancakes, but she wasn't having any of it. Girlfriend was out of sorts the entire day. The dog thinks she's people.
Because of the amount of baking we do around The Acre, we decided to start buying all our flour in bulk. We have been buying bread flour 100lbs at a time from Sams Club, now we've started buying regular flour 50lbs at a time. It holds us for a few weeks.

We promised an update on the seed progress. The rhubarb has sprouted. The package said the ground cherries would take longer to germinate, so we're not worried about them yet.

We have had a hawk circling The Acre for a week now, and it's thrown the girls out of their cycle of egg laying. Towards the end of the week they got back on track, but the result of getting thrown off is double yolk eggs. We guess they try to hold them in rather than risk making the run to the coop for a nest box?

That had to hurt

One last item this week is a baking request. We got an order for two buttermilk pies, and had pie plates delivered to put them in. These were deep dish pie plates, so they are really three pies in two plates. We had to alter the cook time a little, but they turned OK we think.

Big Man mixing up the crust dough

Three pies, two pie plates

We ended the week with football finger foods (that included chicken wings). We don't watch the sporting contest, or even know who was playing this year. But we like to be a part of any celebration that includes food.
K&K