It's A Dog's Life

It's turned cold here at The Acre, and as we welcome cold weather and snow, we have to make adjustments for critters. Heated water bowls for the birds were put out and plugged in, we got caught flat footed one morning and had frozen water for the birds, and that just won''t do. The other noticeable change is Fraidy Mutt. She has been given the executive key to the mansion early, and she seems to be adapting OK with it.

She enjoys all the cooking that goes on.
Before we get to the cooking, we start with canning. This week Big Man helped saw up some downed trees, and loaded up a truck load of smoker wood with help from the family. But, working up a sweat when it's cold out gave Big Man his first cold of the season. So this week was inside stuff. We have two large buckets full of potatoes, so first order of business was getting them canned.

 Twenty four quarts of potatoes from one bucket, and five quarts of collard greens to round out the second batch of jars in the canner.  We also did another batch of cranberry sauce, nine more pints of that on the shelves this week.

We are sure somebody out there is saying "nobody eats that much cranberry sauce" but we do. We go through about one pint a week, so we put up as many jars as we can while they are in season.
We also put up three quarts of deer meat this week. Most of Jake's deer went to ground burger meat, but we had enough leg meat to do this. Here is three more days of meat, when the zombies come.

This week in food was a pretty good one too. We made another home made pineapple and ham pizza from scratch, and it turned out great.

Cupcake hit on the idea to put cranberry sauce on top, and it really set off the pineapple in the pizza. On second thought, we better can more sauce.
One night we had a simple meal of brats. But, we used the Scottish beer left over from making the mustard last week to boil the brats in. Add the home made mustard, and a big scoop of our home made squash relish from this summer, and we had a feast off a simple idea.

We also smoked a chicken for Thor's Day smoker meat. We have had really good luck finding the whole roasters (yes, they come whole for those who don't know) and it feeds us several times after smoke day, as we will get to at the end.

 We included a shot of the smoker working on the chicken, because it is an art to wood fire smokers getting it to smoke right. As you can see from the picture, there is only a whisp of smoke coming from the exhaust. It's magic when it all comes together.

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Big Man whipped up a peach cobbler, and a batch of collard greens fresh from the garden to go along with the chicken.

All in cast iron, or course.
And with the leftover chicken meat, we have a big batch of homemade chicken noodle soup on the stove while we write this entry. We use the chicken bones, boil them down and can the stock for just such an occasion.

Walmart  conspired against us this grocery night, and did not have one single pack of chicken wings for sale, so we stopped at Wades, and they too joined in the conspiracy to end Chicken Wing Sunday. So Cupcake made her world famous baked spaghetti, and nobody complained.
K&K