Really Big Update (Really Big)

You have to read that title in your Ed Sullivan voice for it to make sense. But actually, we fell behind a week on goings on around The Acre, so we have to play catch up.
We thought we would start off with a late garden entry, green beans. Pops planted a row of green beans after we pulled up the rows in the summer, and they have been producing beans the past couple of weeks. Last week we picked a grocery bag full, and got four quarts of beans.

This last weekend we had a hard frost, so we went ahead and pulled up the plants and took the beans that we had, figuring this would be the last of the plants. We did good.

We picked just shy of a full bushel, and it made 14 more quarts of beans. We hope we have enough to last the winter now.
Our next garden entry is strawberries and rhubarb. Because of the frost, we harvested all the rhubarb and picked the last of the berries, so Big Man made three pies. We ate one straight away, and we froze two more, figuring we can heat them up come Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We have enough rhubarb for a couple of more pies that we froze. We are going to try raspberry rhubarb pie with the frozen fruit. We will be sure to update on results.
Now we go from out of the garden, and into the kitchen. We had a couple of smokes over the past two weeks. Big man did a whole chicken, a pork shoulder, brisket tip, and a pork loin. Pigs live hard around The Acre.

Pulled pork BBQ, homemade bourbon BBQ sauce

We used the leftover chicken for a big ol pot of chicken and dumplings one night, because it's getting that time of year again.

And a special shout out to our pal "Rhulenbarb" who gave us the recipe for crock pot dip. We whipped up a batch of that last weekend, and snacked as we worked.

And what did we work on while we snacked, you may have asked yourselves? Home made cranberry sauce, of course. The cranberries have hit store shelves, and we have them in the pot just that quick.

We made 15 jars of cranberry sauce. We know, we hear everyone who just read that say "who eats 15 jars of cranberry sauce?" We do, that's who. We have had a jar open every Sunday morning breakfast since last winter, and it never seems to get old. We will probably make another batch, maybe two more, before the cranberries disappear from store shelves. We may need to start raising cranberries.
Last entry on this update is vehicle stuff.
Big Man changed the oil in both vehicles this past weekend. Since Jacob has started driving, neither one of us drive many miles, so we never hit the five thousand mile mark between oil changes, Big Man hardly drives 5K all year long, so we do a change in the spring, and one in the fall.

We mention the oil change every time, because Cupcake's father, Big Man's outlaw, told her when she first bought her truck, that the oil filter was impossible to reach, and that it couldn't be changed, except by a professional. The oil filter is behind the front bumper, you can reach it without crawling under the truck, so Big Man will continue to mention the oil change, because he hates stupid and lazy people.
We also had a dead battery incident after the hard frost.

We mention it, because in Cupcake's former life, nobody knew how to work a jumper cable, or in this case, a jump box. Stupid lazy people, again get mentioned.
And we washed and waxed the vehicles. A good coat of wax couldn't hurt over the winter.

Our last picture is a view from Pop's garden. Country living rocks.

You know how we end our week.
K&K