Our Typical Weekend

This is our first weekend posting here, so we thought we would share a typical weekend for us with all of you. Saturday morning starts at dawn with dogs and chickens. I also start the gas grill up, (we have a flat cast-iron griddle we cook bacon on) then go back to bed until Jacob comes downstairs to let us know he's ready for breakfast. Jacob is a buttermilk pancake with chocolate chips junkie. The highest complement I've been given as a cook is when I had the flu, and Jacob asked his mother "I know Keith is sick, but he's still making breakfast Saturday, right?" Pop usually comes over as well, so it's a family meal.

After the dishes get washed, kitchen cleaned up, we start our garden or arts/crafts project. We work until early afternoon, then we take the kids to their dad's. After we drop the kids, it's back home to prep our Saturday night meal. It's usually gourmet as we can make it. Yesterday it was meatloaf in cast iron, Mexican cornbread, in cast iron, fried cabbage and baked blue potatoes. It was fit to eat.

We wind down after dinner, pick the kids up and get to bed, because Sunday morning is another big breakfast day. Sunday mornings start at dawn again (now I understand what up with the chickens means) until Jacob lets us know he's ready to eat. From scratch buttermilk biscuits, chip beef gravy (you military types will remember it as poop on a shingle) fried fresh eggs, and usually canned apples or hash browns.

Today after breakfast we had a little down time, so we cut and dried a batch of herbs from Cupcake's herb garden

We also baked a cherry cobbler for one of our neighbors who can't get out much

After we dropped off the cobbler we decided to go down an old country road just to sight see, ended up picking red raspberries along the way, so we have a few more berries to can later. We end our Sunday with the Pièce de résistance.
Cupcake is a chicken wing junkie (I am too, just saying) and for at least the past year now, our Sunday night dinner is always fried chicken wings in homemade wing sauce. I found the trick to making your own wings is a sharp knife. We keep ours shave a hair on your arm sharp, so prepping wings is a snap. They fry in peanut oil for twenty five minutes at 375*, then into a large plastic container where the sauce is added, shaken and served with blue cheese dressing. 

The sauce is the result of many many months of trial and tinker. But the recipe we settled on starts our sweet when you bite into the wing, but ends up spicy. When we start sweating, we know it's right. Perhaps we will share the recipe in a later post.
That's our typical weekend. Now that we've laid the groundwork and background posts will probably slow down a little, but we will be sure to share our next simple adventure.
K&K

Bread and Butter Pickles

Our very first garden, everything in it could be considered "new" on our list of new veggies to try, but today's post was a unique find. Lemon cucumbers. We saw the pack in Tractor Supply when we were buying our seeds, and this was what gave us the idea to try something new each year. Neither one of us had seen cucumbers like this before, and decided to give them a try. Year one, we planted three vines and only one lived to maturity. Yet we made over 30 pints of bread and butter pickles off the one vine. It is a high yield kind of plant. We gifted a few jars, and they became known in Common Man circles as "those yellow pickles".
This year we moved the vines to the top of the garden, and placed a row of chicken wire for them to run up. We are having excellent results thus far...

We also have a few regular green cucumbers in the batch along with two small "gherkin" cucumber vines at the recommendation of The Alphageek. We have yet to find any of them, and fear they may have been lost.  We've made a couple cannings already this year, but today is our most recent batch and we thought we would share.  We picked on the vines all week, until we had enough for a batch.

Once we had enough cucumbers and peppers, we sliced them up and gave them a two day lime and salt soak in one of our third generation crocks.

After soaking for two days, they were rinsed and prepped for packing

Cupcake made the syrup, using a store bought pack from Wade's Supermarket. We are no way affiliated or paid by the makers of the product, or Wade's Supermarket, just sharing the info

After packing the jars, we filled them with syrup, and into a hot water bath at a rolling boil for ten minutes. End result is seven more pints of "those yellow pickles". Cupcake's Great-Grandmother's cabinet is already full, so we're moving this batch to the basement shelves.

We hope someone found this one informative, and with any luck, we will be able to fill all the requests already in the pipe for pickles.
K&K

Pickled Beets

Our first year of canning things included pickled beets. I had a couple jars on hand that I hoarded for special occasions that were given to me by an older lady who grew up in the days of preserve it or you don't eat. I love them, and shared some with Cupcake. "You may get some of these, you may not" was the reaction when she tasted them.
Being the research expert she is, a recipe for pickled beets was located. Next came planting. We planted two rows of beets, but being our first year with beets, we planted them too close together. They came up and we had a lot to can, but because they were so close together they were smaller than a baseball. This did not effect the taste however.
We tried several different takes on the recipe. We tried some with the pickle spice in a bag to flavor the juice. We tried some with the pickle spice loose in the jar. We tried some with cinnamon sticks in the jar. These made the beets very bitter. We settled on jars with the pickle spice loose in the jar.
Local people remember last summer, a Derecho storm hit knocking out electricity for about a week. This was the week we planned to can the beets, so we used the burner on the gas grill, a double burner gas stove, a Coleman camp stove, and kept on canning.
This year we learned, and spread the seeds out in the row when we planted them. Our results were some larger beets.

We boiled the beets for about 45 minutes, just long enough to loosen the skin from the meat, then dumped them in the sink and pulled the skin off. We diced the beets into large chunks and filled our jars. We covered the beets with a sugar juice with pickling spice and hot water bathed them for 45 minutes. One bushel yielded us twenty five quart jars of pickled beets.

Pickled beets are an acquired taste apparently, you either love them or you hate them. We replanted another row of beets after we pulled these, so you can guess which side we come down on. One additional perk to making your own pickled beets, and having chickens, is you get to make all the pickled eggs you care to eat.

The Common Man is a big fan of a veteran owned and operated company called Ranger Up, and they recently posted an article on the benefits of beets in your diet if you are a health nut type. Their post spawned this post. Give their article a read, if you got free time like that  Just Beet It

K&K  

Chickens

We mentioned earlier we raise chickens, we thought we would share a few pictures. Both of us have always wanted to raise chickens, two years ago we figured we would jump in with both feet. Our first step was a coop. When I was a young lad, there was a dilapidated wooden chicken coop on the property, but I didnt know anything about one. Lucky for us, a local man designs and makes coops. We found one we liked and bought it. We placed it in our back yard near the house. We get a real nice breeze here at "The Acre" and if we put it anywhere else, we were pretty sure it would get toppled, so we use the house as a wind break.
Next was a trip to Tractor Supply for chicks. We didnt know the first thing about chickens and made our purchase based pretty much on the color of eggs the birds would lay, we both wanted brown eggs. We bought six "Colombian"  birds, then went back and bought six more "Americana" birds. We asked for all hens, we ended up with five roosters and seven hens after they matured. Helpful hint: You cant have five roosters in your barnyard. The rooster terminator eliminated three roosters from the group, leaving two, both Americana birds. Our first walking boss bird, I named "Buford" for the late, great, Buford T. Justice. He was a green and gold bird, by far the prettiest bird in the flock. We lost Buford to a hawk earlier this spring, leaving us "Big Bob".

Our first batch of birds were comprised of four Colombians, two Comets, and two Americana birds.

We would average four of five eggs a day, but as word spread among friends and family, five eggs a day was not going do. This spring we planned on buying another batch from Tractor Supply, but as it turned out we waited too long and the birds were sold out when we got our ducks in a row to add to our bird family.
Cupcake, being the research expert in the family researched incubators, and we ended up buying an incubator and an automatic egg turner. We selected eggs from the Comet and Americana birds. The Comets are one egg a day layers, without fail. The Americana eggs are green and blue, and they are just pretty. We attempted 18 eggs, half actually hatched. We now added seven Comets and two Americana birds. Best we can tell, eight are pullets and one rooster.

We hope to have the new birds laying eggs for us by mid September. There is absolutely no comparison between store bought eggs and fresh eggs. We allow our birds to "free range" so we open up the coop in the morning and off they go in search of bugs and worms and whatnot. We feed them a morning treat of scratch grain, and I will throw whole corn somewhere in the yard every other day or so, just to keep them on the search. An unexpected perk, we dont have spiders, ants or even earwigs anywhere around the house now.

Fresh eggs do not need to be refrigerated, and will keep at normal room temperature for 90 days, so says the internet. Not that we would know, eggs this good don't lay around long. Besides keeping at room temp, the other noticeable difference is the yolk. Because the birds eat wild, the yolks have an orange tint about them. This turns the UN-informed folks off for some reason.

Every work day (except chip beef gravy Monday) I send Cupcake off to work with a fresh fried egg sandwich. I am convinced that mayonnaise was invented by some sadistic Catholic Priest in the Spanish Inquisition to torture prisoners, but Cupcake likes it on her sandwich, so that's how I make it.

We know not everyone has room for chickens, but we thought we would share our little hobby, and maybe brag on the eggs a little?
K&K   

Pie and Cobbler

As we mentioned in the "Introductions" post, we love to can. Cupcake says we would can air and water if we could, and I'd be OK with that. This year we've had a bounty crop of pie makings. It started when the sweet red cherry tree in the back yard produced, we would pick a hand full every evening while we watched the newly hatched chickens play under the tree. By the weekend, we had enough to can a batch. Then Pop's blackheart cherry tree came in. We made a couple trips over to his house and picked a few at a time. Next came strawberries, rhubarb, then black raspberries. Each as they came, we would grab a little at a time during the week and make a canning on the weekend.

Canning your own pie filling can sound daunting, but trust us, it's easy as pie (pie joke). A small batch at a time adds up over a few weeks, next thing you know, we're adding shelves. We thought we would walk you through our last pie making can that we made last night.

First off, add four cups of sugar and two cups of water to a pot, bring it to a boil.

After it starts boiling, add 3/4 cups of clear jell and four tablespoons of lemon juice to the mix, and bring back to a boil

Last night we had a medley of fruit, just because the fruit season is about over. We had a mix of blackberries (which are just starting to turn) red raspberries (which are bout gone) and blueberries, we've been getting blueberries for a couple weeks now a couple at a time. Blueberries you can just drop into a sandwich bag and freeze as you go until you have a batch. Anywho, we had a small amount of all the above, so we washed em up and prepped them for pie making.

After your mix returns to a boil, we take the pot off the heat and add the fruit, mix well then ladle in to fresh washed Mason jars.

Wipe the mouth of the jar with a wet towel, then place your lid and ring on the jar. We soak our lids and rings in hot water prior to sealing, it's just the right thing to do. Tighten the rings finger tight, then place your jars into a large pot of rolling boiling water for 15 minutes. That's all there is to it. Remove the jars from the water bath and they will "Pop" after a few minutes, letting you know you have a good seal. You can also check by pushing down on the center of the top, if it has any flex to it, you know the jar is not sealed. No flex, good to go.

The jars add up after a while. We have 54 in the basement right now, not counting the ones we have gifted, or used in cobblers for a neighbor.

Cupcake can do her "snow dance" now, we are ready with dessert all winter long.  While we had the canning stuff out last night, I had about a gallon of leftover bourbon BBQ sauce I made. It is tradition for us to smoke a pork shoulder and provide lunch for the Total Car Care boys on vehicle inspection day. I poured the leftover sauce in to a couple half gallon jars, and put them into the pressure canner. Ten pounds of pressure for thirty minutes, and I got sauce for the next pig to meet the "Oklahoma Joe" wood fired smoker. 

There will be plenty of smoker posts to follow, but for now we hope we have inspired at least one person to try and preserve fruit for pies. We will have posts to come showing how we preserve tomatoes, beans, and with any luck, deer meat, come October.
K&K

Blue Potatoes

Every year for the past three years, Cupcake and I have tried to plant, grow and harvest a new veggie in the garden. This year we hit on two. The first was from the mind of the Alphageek and will be a follow up post, just because they have yet to come in, so we got nothing to show just yet. I guess you can call this a veggie teaser?

We decided our second new veggie would be blue potatoes (yeah, we didnt know they came in blue either) but Cupcake found a picture of some, and the seed was planted (pun intended).  Our first step was finding seed. After a bit of internet research, we found Southern States sold blue seed potatoes, for $25 a pound. That seemed a bit high to us, so we kept looking. As luck would have it, a few days later was grocery day. Our bi-monthly visit to Wallyworld found us in the produce isle, and we found a potato medley that contained red, white and BLUE potatoes for a couple dollars a bag. We bought two bags and had enough blue ones for a row.

We left them out in the garage until they started to sprout, then planted them the week of Good Friday. Only two hills came up, and because of all the rain we figured the seed rotted in the ground, so back to Wallyworld, two more bags, and tried it again. This time most of the seed came up, only to be greeted by this little fellow...

If this were a Bugs Bunny cartoon, his name would be "Potato Eat-est". But it's not and I dont know the scientific name for him, but he's a pest of the first order. I used seven dust for a couple months, which I feel certain is potato bug steroids.   Then Cupcake, being the research specialist in the family, found this...

We already had the stuff on hand, since it's used to beat down flies in the chicken coop. I sprinkled some on the potato vines, and it was problem solved, problem staying solved.  Yesterday while I was tinkering in the garden I noticed the first two vines that came up had pretty much made themselves, so I dug the hills and this is what we found....

The ones on the left side will be held in reserve for next year's seed. We will probably try a couple of the big ones this week because we're dying to see what a blue potato tastes like. The rest we will can in our "red, white and blue" medley, another post to follow. 
K&K

Introductions

For anyone who blunders upon our blog, I (Keith) thought a little background might be in order. Kim (Cupcake) and I met in the summer of 1987. She was all of 16, I was a brand new sheriff's deputy at Montgomery County Va. I watched her little orange Volvo drive past me, and thought to myself "boy would I like to find a reason to stop her". As it turns out, her father had allowed her tags to expire :)
I can honestly say, I met my future wife on a traffic stop. Believe it or don't, but I knew from that day I would marry her. We both went on with our lives, separately. But, as fate will do, it brought us back together, after both of us having a rotten experience with "Uncle Billy" and his log home building shenanigans.

We now live together in our log home I named "Arlee's Acre". When I was a young lad I would go blueberry picking with my grandmother along the dirt path that is now our driveway, and she would point to a small ridge on the property and say "a log house would look awful pretty right there". This stuck with a young me, and I give her full credit for inspiring me to put a log home on that little ridge.

Giving credit where credit is due, a shout-out to The Alphageek for coining the phrase "Common man". Since you're in to reading blogs, give his site a look see.
All things Geek


Posts to come will probably be our day to day, things we enjoy doing together. We love sharing our little projects with others. We garden, can, and raise chickens and have a chocolate lab I call "Fraidy Mutt".

Kim has two children, Kattie Grace....

And Jacob...

That's us in a nutshell. We hope someone will find the things we enjoy worth a look from time to time. 

K&K