Peachy

The week snuck up on us this week. It came time to write our update, and we had very few pictures to show for it. We guess there is only so many ways you can fluff up a normal week and make it worth reporting?
We started the week off with our three peaches. We started a bunch of trees the year Cupcake moved out to The Acre. Peach and apple seeds. Several trees lived but we have only got blooms, this year we had three peaches left on the one peach tree closest to the house. Cupcake gave them a squeeze every night we let the dogs out before night night, and she decided they had ripened enough to pick. Monday morning we sliced one open and found it was a white peach with cling free seeds. SCORE!
We ate the one peach we cut open and sliced the other two up to add to our Christmas jam later this year.

On a fruit tree note, we noticed the bush cherries had blooms on them. They started putting out in late April, and then we had a couple of hard freezes in May. The bushes appeared to die off, but put out a few blooms for a picking or two of cherries. This week the dead looking part began to bloom.

We are keeping an eye on these. Old maid tales say a second bloom on fruit trees equals a bad winter ahead. We will put that to the test this year.
Trail cams got us a couple of turkey family pictures this week.

A different take on food this week, we added an over easy egg to our burgers one night. Topped with a garden fresh tomato.

And as always, we ended the week with wings.

Keeping Busy

This week kept us jumping.
We started the week out making even more sketti sauce.

We got nine more quarts of sketti sauce and ten jars of pizza sauce. The rest of the tomatoes are going in to jars this year. We think we have enough sauce.
Speaking of sauce, we had a pint that we didn't can up. We used that for lasagna one night.

We planted a bit of late squash over by the barn and it started coming in. We had fried squash for dinner one night, because it's Cupcake's favorite.

Later in the week we noticed the chickens had started flying into the pear trees and eating the pears right on the limb. So Cupcake picked a sack full of pears early one morning before we let the birds out. It ended up weighing nearly 80lbs. We made twelve pints of jelly (24 jars of jelly, if we could find jelly jars, but we cant) and still only used half the pears we have. Cupcake tried spiced pear jelly on a whirlwind trip for HCA last year, and had her heart set on our very own pears being turned into spiced jelly. So we did, and it's awesome. We don't believe the pears will go to waste, probably more jelly in the coming week.

A couple of pond related things this week. Our big announcement should be ready by the next update, but for now a teaser.

And we have a regular visitor. We've seen him two weeks in a row.

We ended the week with wings but we missed our nap.

K&K

Jelly and Sketti

It was all cooking all the time this week. We have the tomatoes coming in all at once and the jalapeno peppers are starting to come in. We started the week with jalapeno jelly, because it changed Cupcake's life.

We had to put the jelly in pint jars, because there seems to be a shortage of canning lids these days. I guess people are canning toilet paper and lysol?
Anywho, next we canned up almost five gallons of sketti sauce over the whole week.

We did have some fresh collards for dinner one night.

And Lawman fixed our version of Chic-Fil-A chicken biscuits for breakfast one morning, because he has mad free time like that.

After "The Boy" took his batch of choco chip cookies with him fishing, Cupcake requested her own batch. Then the neighbor lady across the street requested a batch. Lawman was a cookie baking machine this week.

And speaking of mad free time, Lawman made another batch of doomsday rations while we were rained inside.

The one thing we did manage to do outside this week was stock the ponds with a few minnows. There is an old single lane wooden bridge near the house that spans a small creek. The creek was running very low last fall, it was only a few inches deep and had no minnows in it. Lawman drove over the creek early in the week and could see it was running full, and he could see minnows. He secured permission last year to trap minnows, so he dropped a couple traps in between flash floods. We caught maybe two or three dozen total over two days. We managed a few bluegill as well. It's all coming together down at the ponds.

We ended the week with chicken wings and a nap.
K&K

Deez Nutz

We are two testicals short at The Acre this week. Augustus had an appointment with the fixin clinic. He did really well, even the vet that did the operation raved about him. He was all kinds of upset with us when we picked him up from the clinic, but he got over it pretty quick. Until the cone came out.
Doc said no licking the wound, and the first thing he wanted to do was lick the wound, so we picked a cone up at the Pet Smart and put it on him at bedtime.

Willow wanted to play, but he was in no mood.

After the first night we took the cone off and he seemed to get back to normal. Two days after surgery, he was running and jumping and playing like his old self. He is supposed to go a week without RJ&P but puppies gonna be puppies.
A funny "ha ha" from surgery day. While Augustus was under the knife, we came home and cleaned out Deathstroke. City folk may not know this, but a farm truck gets dirty. Cupcake had reached her limit on junk in the truck. We took everything out and scrubbed him down. One of the things we took out to scrub was the folding steps we use to load the Dudley Twins up. Somebody (mentioning no names) got an idea to back the truck up closer to the garage, and backed over said steps. They still work, but now the Dudley Twins are the only dogs in town with a spiral staircase for them to climb. When we picked Augustus up, we put the stairs out and he came over to the truck, looked at them, then looked at us like "I'm stoned out of my mind, but I'm not climbing these."

After the dope wore off, both dogs are back up the steps. No harm no foul.
We have a few food related items this week to report. First, we picked our first real picking of tomatoes from the barn garden. We didn't have enough for a canning, and we had too many for a salad. Cupcake hit on the idea to make a fresh batch of sketti sauce.

And while the sauce was cooking, Cupcake was strolling down memory lane about "Crazy Granny" adding a cup of sugar to her lasagna and calling it 'homemade' and a light bulb went off in both of our heads at the same time. We could use the sauce for lasagna too. The batch made almost a gallon, so we canned up three quarts and left the almost full quart in the fridge until the weekend.

This was NOT crazy granny lasagna. "The Outlaw" would throw rocks at her if he ever got a mouthful of this lasagna. Too bad he's batshit crazy. This is now in the rotation in place of baked sketti.
And speaking of tomatoes for salad, when we want one, we just walk out on the back deck and pick a bowl full of salad.

Other notes food related this week is in the vein of zombie prep. We've been reading up on the prepper lifestyle and found the idea of Civil War 'hard tack' and doomsday rations. During the 50's when fallout shelters were all the rage, the government came up with doomsday rations for folks to keep in the shelters. It's made from bulghur flour. The recipe was simple so we made a batch as a trial run. The government guidelines calls for six bars per day per person. It says it wont win any cookoff contest, but it will keep you alive for weeks at a time. With the current situation, we think we may stockpile a couple backpacks full of the stuff. Just in case.

While we had all the stuff out, we made a batch of hard tack as well. It was a little more labor intensive and the cook time was twice as long, but both recipes are shelf stable forever. Lawman read that Civil War soldiers said the hard tack could stop a bullet, and after trying one for flavor, he believes it. Another funny "ha ha" Cupcake was calling it "heart attack" while we were making it.

The recipe calls for plain flour, but we used wheat flour. As Dr. Sheldon Cooper says..."what's life without whimsy?"
Our last food related note this week.
"The Boy" is going on a fishing trip with three of his buddies this week, and he requested a batch of Lawman chocochip cookies to take with him.

The recipe makes about five pounds of cookie dough. We figure that will last four young men on a boat about two hours?
We ended the week with an earthquake, wings, and a nap.
K&K