Reunion Time Again

This past week ended with our family reunion, which is always the last Sunday in June. Cupcake was disappointed again this year, because the Price family reunion always ends in drunken brawls, the arrival of law enforcement, and someone getting stitches. Apparently ours is bland by comparison. This year our cousins, Bill and Francis attended. They are regular followers of the blog, and it was a real treat to get to hang out with them for a while. We made sure we sent them, and their friend Joyce,  home with a few canned goodies from the stockpile.

Joyce, Bill and Francis (L-R)

The food table is filling up

Dessert table

Big Man making one of his two pies for dessert 

We smoked a Boston Butt roast and made pulled pork BBQ, and two pies for the reunion. A strawberry rhubarb, and a peach pie. Big Man had never made a peach pie before, so he used the reunion attendee's for guinea pigs. We think it will be added to the rotation, reviews were good.

Boston Butt

A couple of projects from the past week. One was the deck. Our deck has started to show some weathering, so we decided it was about time to give it a treatment. We looked at several store bought deck cleaners, but nothing cheap was found, and we like a bargain, so we did some checking on the internet. We found the best rated cleaner was Oxyclean. And we just happened to have a jug of it on hand. We mixed it up with some boiling water and Borax, and sprayed it on the deck. The water treatment will follow next blog, since it's supposed to be rain free the first couple of days of the week. Stay tuned for updates.

The second project was an Acre tradition, canning peaches. Every year we put up as many peaches as we can get our hands on. Cupcake likes her some peach cobblers, and now we've added peach pie to the rotation, so there's that.

And we added a new twist to the peach canning, peach jam. We did a double batch of that while we were at it. And have a dozen jars for our effort, that should get us through the year.

And of course there was food.
We were expecting "The Beamer" to show up for chicken wing Sunday, but we got stood up. It's a shame, because we had a special treat to add to the wings. Crawfish. Big Man steamed up a dozen or so, just to add a little zig to our zag.

Other food related items were salmon. We grilled a slab of salmon one night, and used the leftover meat to make salmon patties. We froze the patties for a quick meal down the road.

Chicken fajita roll ups. We had some chicken left over from a fajita meal, and used it up for this neat trick. It really turned out great.

We rolled it up, baked it until the crust was crispy brown. This one fed us twice, so it was worth the price.
And steak, we seem to be having seared steak at least once a week these days.

And we got our first picking of green beans from the garden. That means green bean canning is just around the corner.

We added a few chicken pictures, just because they are cute, and it's kind of our thing.

We have about forty birds now, so it's hard to name them all, but the white on is "chirp"

And on a chicken related note, we added a new sign to the kitchen. We love chickens, and we love coffee.

And we leave you this week with a sight Big Man is used to seeing on a regular basis, "The Hand"

Our belly was full after the reunion, so we put off wings until Monday.
K&K