Birds and Balls

This week was Thanksgiving, so we put on the dog in the food department. We always fix enough food to feed a heavy weapons platoon, even though we don't have a platoon to feed. Most of our food goes home with other people, and we are thankful to be blessed like that. It's a problem not a lot of people have these days.
So lets get to it.

Best smoked turkey to date, came out perfect (notice the thermometer RB?)

This is what home made mac n cheese looks like (crazy granny). We called this one "cheesehenge"

Deviled eggs are much better with our home made dill pickles in the mix.

Fruit cake

Buttermilk pie and apple cake

Apple cake topped with Big Man's soon to be world famous cream cheese frosting

There was still time during the day for selfie shenanigans, and photo bombing.

Fraidy Mutt stayed out of the way for the most part, because she has her new winter bed.

After everyone got their belly full, we boiled the bones of the turkey. We hate to waste anything around The Acre, and home made turkey broth is just a bonus all year long.

Three gallons of turkey broth, straight out of the canner

Cupcake made a few Mason jar decorations for the holiday....

After all the holiday stuff was over and done with, we started gearing up for Christmas. First order of business, sausage balls.

Our first batch of balls are done, and almost gone. Big Man has never been a fan of sausage balls, but the ones that Cupcake make are the exception to that rule. We understand "The Outlaw" is a huge fan of them as well. Guess he backed the wrong horse a few years ago?
We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Short, Fat and Slow

Big Man carries a .45 auto as his "go to" self defense round. It's short, fat and slow, kind of like this weeks update. But unlike the handgun, this update will not knock a barn door off with one hit. So there's that.
The only thing we can figure is, we are gearing up for Thanksgiving and the day to day stuff is getting pushed back to the small burner. We have been tinkering around with dessert things, which is our one picture update this week.
We saw a recipe for pumpkin cheesecake desserts, we had canned pumpkin, we had cream cheese, and Big Man had a lot of free time this week.
We started out with just plain flour, sugar and Amish cocoa powder, mixed it up in the blender until we had a firm paste, and pressed it in to the bottom of cupcake wrappers.

Then we mixed up the cheesecake part, with one cup of pumpkin and pumpkin pie flavor

Then we baked them at 325* for about a half an hour.

The recipe called for a simple chocolate topping, one cup of heavy cream heated to just before boiling, and stir in a cup of chocolate chips. We used dark chocolate because we're rebels like that. It was an alright recipe, but we didn't think it tasted like pumpkins or cheesecake. It was more like a black bottom. We plan on doing these again, only without the pumpkin and just go straight cheesecake.

While we are on the baking thread, Brother Kevin and family had a bake sale at their church this week, and they asked for a couple of buttermilk pies to donate to the sale. We whipped up two, and we understand they sold for a higher price than most pies, so we are proud we could help out.

One non baking food item, we roasted a salmon fillet one night for dinner. It's a whole fillet, so with the leftover meat, we made salmon patties and froze them for a meal down the road. If it feeds you twice, it's worth the price.

Tune in next week for a massive food related update. We like to "put on the dog" for Thanksgiving.
We ended this week with wings.
K&K

This Week Stinks

This week slipped past us with very little to report on for some reason. Looking back, we were as busy as usual, but we failed to document it seems.
Our lead off picture is a new nightly visitor. Fraidy Mutt has learned her lesson about trying to chase skunks, so we live and let live.

One thing that did happen this week was chicken related. All at once, the Americauna birds started laying eggs. In years past, it's taken almost ten months before they mature, but this year it was six months. We now get over a half dozen blue eggs each day, and at least 18 eggs total.
A good side effect of this is word seems to have spread around that we sell eggs, because business has picked up at the end of the driveway. We guess the "honor system" selling resonates with days gone by buyers?

We did have a rained in project this week. Regular readers know that our cousins Bill and Francis have been keeping us in jars. Well this past week, Bill's brother Wayne and his wife Betsy, sent us another load of jars by Pop. A big "Thank You" goes out to them this week. So with jars on hand, we made a big batch of ketchup. We started out with two quarts of this years garden tomatoes.

We slow cooked garden onions and a few teaspoons of cinnamon and garlic until it cooked down to the thickness we wanted, added a little brown sugar, and bingo bango, ketchup.

Straight Outta the Canner

 Cupcake got a big jump on Christmas this week and wrapped the presents we have on hand.

Veterans Day was this week as well, so regular followers will remember it's swap the flag time. We move down from the 5X8 to the 3X5 flag, because we get a really nice breeze here at The Acre in winter time.

And the food update was a real winner this week. Big Man smoked a brisket, but he did not soak it in buttermilk like he usually does. This time he went with the same prep he uses for steaks. On Thor's day, he put the brisket on at 0630hrs, but the wind was crazy blowing, and the smoker was off it's game a little. It smoked for twelve hours, but when we took it off, we almost had to eat it with a spoon. The brisket was more tender than the boiled turnips we had with it. This will be the new prep for brisket from now on.

And we ended the week with wings.
K&K

Pumpkins and Promotions

This week we started practice for Thanksgiving by using fresh pumpkin for pie. Regular followers know we have been on a buttermilk and chocolate pie kick recently, but with the holiday approaching, we decided to get more traditional.
We don't know why everyone wouldn't want to use fresh pumpkin, but we try not to dwell on it. We went by the recipe, to the letter, for our first attempt. It turned out well, but we thought we could do better.

Split it, gut it and bake it

Home made pie crust. Always

Next year's pumpkin patch is ready for planting

We thought the first pie could have used a little brown sugar and a little more spice, so we gobbled up the first pie and tried again.

Pumpkin fell right out of the skin

Brown sugar really changed the look

The second pie turned out much better. We think we have hit on our mixture for the holidays. Plus we had a little left over pumpkin that we used in Saturday morning pancakes.

All blue eggs, all the time now

And speaking of pancakes, Fraidy Mutt always looks forward to Saturday because she gets a helping of silver dollar pancakes. She waits patiently until it's time for her breakfast.

For the promotion part of our title this week, we are proud to announce that Jake was nominated and elected by his crew mates to be the new engineer at his firehouse.
And before his bump up, the cooking bug rubbed off on him. He asked if he could bake a meal one night.

Pizza rolls

And he put down another deer this week.

Shot through the heart, and he's to blame.....

For the food portion of our weekly update, Cupcake went old school Army and made a big pot of "Chili-mac"  Everyone who's been to the field always looked forward to at least one chili-mac meal.

Project for the week, we made a double batch of cranberry sauce. Ten more jars in the pantry.

Followers know our cousins Bill and Francis gave us a big load of canning jars last week. One of the things in the box of jars was a plastic bird with grass seeds. We planted them last week, and the grass has sprouted. What's life without a little whimsy?

And since it's cooled off and we've been keeping the windows shut, we started our boil pot to keep the house smelling seasonal. We added fresh grown mint to it this year.

And lastly this week, we mention our winter forecast. A pal of Big Man who lawyers in The People's Republic mentioned this past week that he saw honeysuckle blooming outside of the courthouse. We have always heard that when spring flowers bloom in late fall, it's going to be a bad winter.
We have spring bushes blooming here at The Acre, and the apple tree out back is holding on to fruit in the top of the tree. This is so the animals will have food above the snow. We predict a whole lot of snow.

We ended the week like we always do. Wings
K&K

Never Rub Another Man's Rhubarb

This week was Halloween. We pay homage to Jack Nicholson's Joker because of the above line. Every time we go to the garden to harvest rhubarb, Big Man rattles off that line. It's his second favorite line from the Joker in that movie, second only to "How does a man, dressed as a bat, get all my press?"
 This week, it was all rhubarb all the time.

First thing we had to do, was dig up the sod from our new rhubarb patch. We decided on a patch behind the new garden. It's flat, and it's near an electric pole, which was awkward to mow around in the summer. After getting the sod up, we had to dig up the roots from our established rhubarb.  The hippies that write about such things say every four years, one should dig up and split the root mass to keep them healthy. So we dug up our roots. We had a couple of good hard freezes recently, so the roots should have gone dormant.

We found years ago that old school post diggers was the best way to plant rhubarb root. After we split our bulb bunches, we had ten new sets. We got them all planted in the new bed, so we had to insulate them for the winter. First step was chicken poop. We had been putting off cleaning the coop out until we could get the rhubarb planted. We scooped the poop and old hay, and topped the roots.

After we spread the poop, we covered the bed with peat moss. And because we have chickens, and it is their nature to scratch a bed like this clean, we covered the whole thing with chicken wire. Damn birds.

Last but not least, we replaced the hay in the coop with fresh hay. Our girls are now fresh insulated for the winter. A big thank you goes out to Jake, who made the trip to town for our hay and peat moss.

One other project, if you can call it a project. We have jelly making down to something we can do within an hour. This one was no exception. Cranberries have shown up in local markets so that means cranberry sauce. And lucky for us, our cousins Bill and Francis sent a large collection of canning jars to us. We promised to put them to good use, so that's what we did.

Free jars? Yes please

We go whole berry

And we have to have a food post. This week it was deer chili. Jake got his deer meat from the meat processing plant, and Big Man went to work making his soon to be world famous deer chili.

We know at least two pints have been consumed in Afghanistan, that's world wide?

We had chili for dinner, then canned the rest. It made three gallons (12 quarts) so we should be all set for chili this winter. It turned out a bit more spicy than usual, and we're OK with that.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K