Out Foxxxed

This week we had to deal with both of us being sick. Lawman came down with a cold early in the week, and by weekend, Cupcake started with symptoms. We guess it's just our turn. The week started off with a bang. Literally.
Lawman has tinkered around with different baits, boiling traps in wax, scents and lures. Nothing seemed to work on a sly fox. Lawman broke down and purchased two trail cameras with video capability, and began testing. Was it the traps that sent the fox away? Did they smell a rat when he baited the traps with store bought stuff?
This particular scent brought in two foxxxes one night, and as you can see in the video, they really got in to it.

The second video showed both foxxxes fiddling around the scent at the same time.

So armed with this new information, traps were set and baited.

After we caught the first fox, Lawman figured with fox #2 seeing the traps, he would never catch the second one. But being hard headed and having plenty of free time, he endeavored to persevere (Outlaw Josie Wales reference for non nurds).
Lawman remembered having a conversation with an at heart mountain man on the PD probably fifteen years ago about how to bait a trap for coyote ( shout out to Dennis Freeburger ) and because it's a family-ish setting, we won't share his baiting tip. But, Lawman used it with great results.

Lawman can hear one particular voice saying "It's the same fox, he just moved it for the picture" (We're looking at you, Rex Snider) so....

We're keeping them in the freezer until trapping season is over, then we plan on selling the skins to pay for this years new chicken purchase. Since it's the predators that caused our loss in the first place, let them pay for the new chicks.
We still managed to do a couple of small projects this week and did a little cooking. We made a new batch of laundry detergent.

We made a fresh batch of pizza sauce and canned it. We started off with our garden tomatoes that we canned this summer.

Added some herbs from Cupcake's herb garden and slow cooked it down all day. When it got to be the right consistency, we canned it.

Five pints will make ten pizzas, that should hold us for a month or two?
We did our regular cooking routine this week, but a couple of standouts were cloud bread.

And mashed potato pancakes. We love having these with Sunday breakfast.

We ended the week with wings, in hopes the sauce will flush this bug out of our systems.
K&K

Music City

This week we traveled to Nashville for Cupcake's job. She had a meeting with the big boss and Lawman traveled along as chauffeur and armed security. We took the camera along, but the entire trip was work and drive. Lawman spent the days searching for a bottle of Knob Creek 2001, but was foiled at every turn. He did pick up a new rain slicker at a fancy boot/leather shop in Nashville.
Before we left our new comforter arrived. We went more traditional quilt look this time around, we think it's more log home looking.

  We also stopped along the way to the holy ground of cooking, the Lodge cast iron outlet. We picked up a cast iron pie plate and a few other odds and ends.

We couldn't wait to use it, so Sunday morning we baked our biscuits in it to break it in.

Before we left we cooked on meal. We smoked a roaster chicken and boiled the bones for another round of chicken broth. We use a lot of chicken broth Around The Acre.

Lawman also picked up a couple of new trail cameras to assist in the predator hunt. We hope to have some wildlife footage next week.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Lotion in Motion

This week we found a recipe for homemade lotion. Cold, wet days are perfect for indoor projects so we gave this a try.
We already had all the fixings for the recipe. It calls for coconut oil, coco butter, bee's wax. We tossed in some essential oil for flavor and it turned out really well.

Finished product

Double boiler to melt it all down

Lotion molds

Pouring into the molds

Other things that go well with cold, damp days is comfort food. We smoked a whole roaster this week.

This is NOT crazy granny mac-n-cheese

More cloud bread

After the meal, we boiled down the bones with spices to include fresh cut rosemary for a few more jars of chicken stock.

Rosemary, bay leaves, carrots, celery....

Three more jars into the rotation

Kattie Grace caught the bug for baking this week. She found a recipe she wanted to bake. Jake pestered her the entire time she was making the dish, then grabbed it up to mug for the camera. It turned out really well.

Lawman is still doing his dance with the fox and coyote. This week we added a few more tools in the fight. Lawman boiled and stained them before going to the field. We will report on results.

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Cupcake's Dance

Cupcake had great success with her "snow dance" this week. Leading up to the weekend, every day looked and smelled like snow. The forecast was for less than an inch to fall Friday night into Saturday morning, sowe did not make our usual preparations for being snowed in. Friday afternoon as we drove into town, it started sticking to the roads. We decided to grab dinner to go and head back across the mountain just in case. By the time we got to Pilot Mountain, people had gotten stupid. Some just stopped in the middle of the road and gave up.
We woke up to about nine inches at The Acre, so Lawman broke out the new toy. We're not sure why we didn't invest in a snow blower sooner.

Let it snow

"I'm ready for spring"

We have a few food related pictures to share this week. Starting off, New Year's day. Folklore says health and wealth all year if you have blackeye peas and collards for your first dinner of the year. Who are we to argue with mountain folklore? We still have collards in the garden, but this may be the last meal we get from them. Still, fresh from the garden is tough to beat the first day of January.

Fresh collards and smoked brisket for flavor

It's not just a band

New Year's done right

Cupcake stepped up with a couple of recipes this week. First, she made stuffed peppers for the first time in quite a while. These were well worth the wait.

Then she found a recipe for "cloud bread" which contains no carbs. We are not the "new year, new us" type of people, but it probably wouldn't hurt us to try eating a little healthier after the cookies, cakes and boiled custard we put away recently.

And after saying that, we decided that Saturday was going to be our eat whatever we wanted day, since our trip to Dude's Drive In happens every Saturday. We didn't try to get to town this weekend because of poor drivers, so we stayed in and Lawman used a quart of our canned white peaches to make Cupcake's favorite. Peach cobbler.

And after a week of cloud bread, we splurged and made a loaf of the real thing for Saturday night dinner.

Then we got back to ending the week with wings.
K&K

New Year '17

We slept through the new year's arrival, but when we woke up we found it arrived without us. We're OK with that.
We ended the old year with some success on the predator front. We had a bit of snow over the week, and Lawman could see the travels of a coyote and two bobcats. He adjusted the lure on the traps from fox to bobcat, and we had good results.

We had hoped that this was the mate to the bobcat we killed earlier in the year but tracks in the snow say that is not the case. It will give Lawman something to outsmart until garden season.
We tried to show how the trap thing works, this is our results.

Dig a hole, set the trap

Cover the trap. We use peat moss because it won't freeze like dirt

We scatter a little native dirt on top, then toss around ground cover

We had an inside project this week. Kattie Grace bought a piece of furniture with her own money after Christmas to help organize her room. We put it together one night this week. We think for the first time ever, all the holes lined up and assemble was a snap.

Then there was food.
People ask us how we manage to survive without a microwave oven. We cook our food on the stove or in the oven, and when it comes to leftovers (we had plenty of leftovers after Christmas) we toss the meal into a cast iron skillet and heat it up in the oven. We eat out of the skillet, and only dirty up two forks. The skillet rinses clean. Bingo, Bango, a meal without effort.

We made ourselves a homemade pizza one night

And Cupcake found a recipe for a baked Philly Cheesesteak wrap that was wonderful. We will most definitely be keeping this one in the rotation.

Lay out crescent rolls in a circle

Cover with meat/onion/peppers/cheese

Wrap and bake with a little egg wash and sprinkle with Italian seasoning

Tastes as good as it looks

And last but not least, we kept with folklore tradition. Sunday night we skipped our usual wings for a good luck meal of blackeye peas with country ham, fresh from the garden collards with a little brisket tossed in for flavor, and cornbread.

Happy New Year from Arlee's Acre!
K&K