Jelly and Jablonskis

One of the themes we have around The Acre is..."everything works out like it's supposed to". We are going to start off this week with an example. Saturday morning we hit the garden and picked two baskets full of tomatoes. We brought them back to the house and canned them up, but we used every last empty jar in the house.
Since we've bought more cases of jars than we can remember, we thought our season was over and what we have on hand will have to do us this winter. Now granted, we've probably got enough stuff canned up to feed a heavy weapons platoon for an extended zombie apocalypse, but that's not really the point.
Just as we were primping for our big Saturday on the town, we got a message from the one and only Alphageek. He had two boxes of Mason jars he needed to find a home for. (Yeah baby, talk canning jars, that's hot). So after the long way around the barn, we wanted to thank the entire AG family who greeted us and made us feel like we were doing them a solid, when they were the ones balancing The Acre out.
P.S.
Sister Geek has a smoked BBQ date next trip up. So there's that.

These are a few of the jars we gave a good home to. And once we got them settled in and all washed up, we filled them with plum jelly. Some of them anyway, others are slated for jalapeno jelly early next week.

So here is the tomatoes we picked/canned just before the good turn.

Wing sauce. A few of you may have noticed we end our week with spicy chicken wings every Sunday? Well, this past weekend we used up the last of the on hand sauce, so a new batch was cooked up and canned.

One more empty jar went to our new obsession. Pickled eggs.

And last week we reported that Kattie Grace baked us a cake, but dead batteries kept us from sharing it with the world, so here is the cake.

A couple of quick food related pictures. First, the school house rolls are getting better on the presentation side.

And one afternoon Big Man was watching a cooking show that featured fried green tomatoes. They breaded theirs different than we do, so we ran out to the garden and grabbed a couple of our green tomatoes and tried it the TV way. This may be our new recipe.

For the odds and ends of this week, we picked the apples on our apple tree. Not a lot this year, but enough for a fried apple dish for Sunday breakfast, and high hopes for next years yield.

Our back deck cabbage plants are still doing well.

Our chickens still come running when it's feeding time.

Some even get a good seat, waiting for Big Man to show up with the scratch grain.

We've been throwing the grain into the woods behind the house instead of in the yard. We have learned that they find more bugs/worms in the woods while they are going after the grains. Our birds have become too spoiled to hunt on their own, so we trick them in to it. The layer feed consumption is way down, but egg production is holding steady. We might be getting the hang of this?

Our last item this week has been a long time coming. Big Man's last partner in the former life passed away a while back. T.Marc Colburn (expert witness, deceased) was a big part of the tail end of the police career, and Big Man was honored by his parents when they sent his detective badge to him. This week we honored T.Marc by hanging a shadow box with his badge in the "great room" for all to see.

We ended the week with wings.
 And a shot of Bushmills
K&K