Family, Food and Fun

 It was a very busy week around The Acre. Full moon potato planting, crazy chickens, family and food. As Bugs Bunny would say "we better get to climbing this bean stalk, or we won't have a story".
We started the week off on the foggy side. We're not sure what it is about a foggy day, but the chickens always act goofy. One of the perks to having chickens, other than two dozen eggs a day, is entertainment value.

We love chickens so much, we added chicken themed items to the kitchen this week.

Our two or so regular followers may know we try to live by as much folklore as we can around The Acre. One of the big ones is planting potatoes on Good Friday. As our luck would have it, mother nature geared up to pour rain on Good Friday, so the day before (under the full moon)...

Full moon setting over the old family farmhouse

...we planted our potatoes. And it's a good thing we did, because it rained just enough on Friday to make the garden unworkable. So we got them planted and got them watered. Now we wait.

Seed potatoes with plenty of sprouts

Straight rows this year, who woulda thunk it?

It must be spring, because the weeping cherry tree is about to bloom.

We also planted two rows of carrots in the new garden, and a third row in the old garden. Last year we canned carrots, and we just did not have enough to last us the winter. They were that big of a hit. This year we will be ready to meet our carrot needs.
So for those keeping tabs, we have onions, lettuce, collards, peas, potatoes and carrots planted. Our grow operation in the basement is doing better than expected. Our tomato plants are bigger than usual for this time of year. We would add pictures of them, but with a thirty picture update this week we thought maybe we would add it next week. We wouldn't want to be accused of photo fatigue.
After the garden was squared away, we geared up for cooking. We don't really need an excuse for a great big meal, but Easter dinner is kind of our jam. First off, Big Man fired up the smoker and smoked a whole ham.

When the meat falls off the bone, you got it right

And having a yard full of chickens means we're going to make some of the freshest deviled eggs anyone will ever taste. We used our home made dill and 'them yellow' pickles. These were excellent.

We don't know why everyone wouldn't make their own pickles

That brings us to the "dishes Crazy Granny wishes she could fix" section of the meal. All from scratch. First off, corn pudding.

Cupcake on the business end of the corn pudding

Then we made a from scratch banana pudding. Nothing from the little box this year (we're throwing shade here, in case you were wondering).

Big Man on the business end of the banana pudding

The final dish was delegated to Big Man this year. He has really improved his game when it comes to mac-n-cheese, and this batch was no exception.

Finished products, just before meal time.

Sweet potato casserole, corn pudding, baked spaghetti

Banana pudding

After everyone got their belly full, we turned the chirruns loose with kites. Our luck being what it is, we didn't have a puff of wind hardly, so the kids had to rely on foot power to get the kites in the air.

When foot power wasn't getting the job done, Big Man (aka "Uncle Bubbles") stepped in and showed the chirruns how we did it back in the day.

WOW!

Fraidy Mutt came out to watch the kite show.

"Ya'll got any of that ham left?"

There was some shenanigans going on while the kids were flying their kites.

And even Pops seemed to get "wrapped up" in the excitement.

While the kids were doing their thing, the topic of chocolate chip cookies came up. Big Man said he could whip up a batch of dough in just a few minutes. This excited the chirruns.

Choco chip cookies? Really?

After Big Man made the cookie dough, he bagged it up for the kids to take home with them, but a little one sneaked a taste out of the bag (who doesn't like raw cookie dough?) and after one taste, grabbed a fork and went to town. The cookies might make it home, they might not.

This is a rare week friends, we could not possibly eat chicken wings Sunday night. We ended the week with ham biscuits and buttermilk pie.

K&K

Preachers, Pi and Peaches

This week we had national Pi day, and everyone on the "Faceplace" were making a ta-do over it, so we bowed to public pressure and baked up one of our frozen blackheart cherry pies. We ate pretty well, since it was St. Patrick's day we did a brisket, and we had our from South America cacau powder delivered, so there was some chocolate items this week. Let's get to it.
To start, we had an unseasonably warm week. This lead to most of the existing fruit trees putting out blooms. We are really excited about that, because it's been five years since we planted the first fruit trees, and this should be the first producing year. Plus it's awful pretty.

Lotta cherry blooms

Cherry tree

Peach blossoms

We had pie, on National Pi day.

Then we made a chocolate cake. German chocolate cake.

With our new coca powder.

Then Cupcake made her world famous (and "Outlaw" favorite) preacher cookies

Then we have St. Patrick's day. While all the world makes corned beef and cabbage, we smoke brisket. We have cabbage too, but we bet ours is better.

The smoker was working just right this week. You know it's working right when you can't see the smoke.

We wish we knew someone who knew how to make cologne. If we could patent "smoking brisket" in a bottle, we would have Bill Gates formatting our flash drives for us.
Our one non food related update is toothpaste. We made a fresh batch of toothpaste, and added a little bit of DE earth for grit. All natural, it's how we roll.

Saturday we went to town to do some trading, and we found half priced grape vines at one of our favorite spots. So we bought two more grape vines, and we're going to plant them to run along the garden fence. Then we bought two more peach trees and two more plum trees. We will plant all these in the coming week. Probably potatoes as well, since "Good Friday" comes this week, and lore calls for potato planting.
Wee ended the week with wings.
K&K

Planting Underway

This week we started planting our garden things. We planted our onions, a row of collards, a planter of snap peas, lettuce and a few pots of herbs. We would have shown you pictures of all this stuff, but it would be a bunch of pictures of dirt. We're pretty sure your dirt looks like our dirt, so if you're curious, look down.
We also put a whole lot of work into our chicken coop this week. We shoveled out three wagon loads of poop. Rather than let it go to waste, so hauled it over to Pop's garden and he spread it out on the future row of his potato row.
The other chicken news is we started saving our eggs to hatch. March 22,23 are prime days to set the eggs to hatch, according to The Farmer's Almanac. We ordered the new birds from Tractor Supply but we have to hatch chicks, it's in our DNA.
Funny story of the week involves Cupcake once again. After we had our wings we always take the trash to the dumpsters to get rid of the chicken packaging and wing bones. This trip, Big Man reminded Cupcake it was save the eggs day. The conversation went something like this: "I forgot, we will start tomorrow, of course we are saving the green eggs, so I guess I can find the ones I picked up today, I mean the new eggs are on top, OK, we can start today".
Big Man has noticed it's best to just let Cupcake argue with herself until she wins the argument. Things always work themselves out when he does.
On with the pictures.
We started out planting our new fruit bushes along the garden fence.

Then Tuesday our new appliances arrived.

Our stove we broke using the canner on it, so we went old school range so we can use the canner inside. And our dryer got to the point we had to run it five or six times to dry one load of clothes. We send our condolences out to Appalachian Power, they will miss our huge bill each month.
One rainy day, Big Man was stuck inside so he made a fresh batch of orange marmalade. We opened our last reserve jar this week, and there was a look of panic on everyone's face. We shall not run out of marmalade.

All from scratch, it's labor intensive

Some food related pictures.
We're still getting double yolker eggs.

And we had Cupcake's favorite. Monday is now officially "chicken paprika" day.

And on a happiest of food related notes, this coming week St. Patrick's Day falls on Thursday. Thursday is always officially "Thor's red meat offering day" so Big Man prepped a beef brisket ten days in advance. Our twist on corned beef and cabbage.

We beat our meat

We ended the week with wings.
K&K

Humpty Dumpty

This week we ended up with an accident that made us laugh. Well, Big Man anyway. Saturday we cleaned out the garage to make room for the new addition to our flock, and take all the Christmas stuff back to the barn and whatnot. We had a small path from the house door to the garage door, and that just won't do. Now we have a clean garage with plenty of room for the 40 new chicks we ordered from Tractor Supply. But we digress.

We hooked up the trailer to the Big Blue Bus, and backed the trailer up to the garage door to load up all the junk we hauled off. Big Man tried to step over the tongue of the trailer, and hooked his foot, causing a great fall. After a system check for a few minutes, it was determined nothing was broken, so off to the green boxes we went.

It's funny because last year Cupcake slipped on some ice in the driveway, and fell flat on her back. Big Man was in the truck jamming out to George Jones classic tune of "The King is Gone" and Cupcake was concerned there was no rush to aide. For over a year now she's said "just wait until you fall, I'll be standing over your singing 'Ya-ba-dab-a-do' to you". Well, Big Man stayed down until the lyrics kicked in, but it was in vain, there was no serenade. Cupcake did poke her fingers into Big Man's ribs and asked "that hurt?". It was classic Cupcake.

But back to our update. We did some baking, we did some usual stuff, we sold some eggs and had a new kind of egg show up this week. We will start off with that.

We get about two dozen eggs a day, so you must think we're crazy for adding 40 more hens to our flock? We are not, Big Man was tested. Twice, by the PD. Most of the ones we ordered lay chocolate brown eggs, we don't have any of them yet, so we added on. We also added another dozen or so to the blue eggers. The blue eggs are a big hit on the local egg sales. One day while collecting eggs, we found this one in the box.

We've seen yolk's with no shell. We've seen soft shell eggs, but we've never seen anything like this one. Our birds are unique.

On a chicken related note, Big Man changed the oil in the chicken wing fryer this week. The wings come out a whole new shade of brown with fresh oil.

While we were adding on to our flock this week, we picked up a bunch of new fruit plants. We found gooseberries, jostaberries, another grape vine, something that is a cross between raspberry and blackberry that we've never seen before, and we got another plum tree to add to the orchard. We are about to be some jelly making people in another couple of years.

It's supposed to be in the 70's all this coming week, so we're going to go ahead and plant these, and maybe put in a row of onions in the garden. Have we mentioned how excited we are to start planting?

We did the usual stuff this week on the food front. We start off with Cupcake's favorite Monday meal, paprika chicken.

Then there was Thor's Day red meat offerings. It snowed Thursday, in what we hope was winter's last gasp. There's nothing like a good slow cooked pot roast on a snowy day.

And Cupcake loves her some of Big Man's mac-n-cheese. Unlike "crazy granny" who opens a store bought pack of mac-n-cheese and sprinkles shredded cheese on it, then calls it home made, Big Man goes all from scratch.

And to mix things up on the dessert front this week, Big Man made an apple pie for after meal goodness.

This week Cupcake found a recipe floating around the Faceplace for carrot cake cookies. She wanted to make these for the family shindig on Easter, but Big Man thought we should probably make a test run first, just to make sure they came out alright before we served them to folks. Success

We topped them with some of Big Man's soon to be world famous cream cheese icing. Bring on Easter, because we nailed this one.
We ended the week with wings.
K&K