Baby It's Cold Outside

No, we're not nuts. We discovered "Frosty Paws" ice cream for fraidy mutt. She's always been a scraps after dinner kind of mutt, but in the evenings we have been on the back porch with an ice cream for ourselves. Now she can enjoy the shade and quiet with us.

We also enjoy watching the new chicks peck around and chase bugs. Our Maran birds are two different colors, some are black and speckled while some are gray and speckled. We look forward to having a little variety in the coop soon.

"The twins" as we now call them stop by to check out the back porch goings on most evenings. We are pretty sure they are male/female twins. We hope so anyway.

We need some quiet time in the evenings, because we've been harvesting garden goodies every day.

And we've started Cupcake a dried pepper string to decorate/hold our peppers

Pickle production is in full swing. We put away 18 pints one afternoon, mostly dill, but we've started getting the yellow cucumbers on a regular basis, that means "them yellow pickles." A big shout out to Pops for supplying us with two cases of jars just prior.

First we wash

Slice and lime in our crock

Next day, rinse again

Bottle and bath

We also got a request for some of our Christmas pickles that we mentioned last week. We let our cucumbers get extra big before we picked them, then did another batch. This week we went green to go with last week's red.

Slice and de seed

Dyed and soaked

In jar with syrup, soak overnight

Water bath. Three day process

We've been getting creative with our garden bounty. Of course we have fried green tomatoes and fried squash. We've been tinkering with fried dill pickles to use up the extra batter we have when we fry veggies. They are not up to standard just yet, but we have plenty of time to practice.

We also made a batch of salsa. There is nothing like taking vegetables straight from the vine and putting them in the pot to make a dish.

We even used fresh basil from Cupcake's herb garden on the deck boxes. We got six pints of salsa from this batch, and we're pretty sure we will be making more. When the zombies come we will still be able to enjoy chips while the hoards pass by.
We made our first attempt at a family recipe for brown sugar pie. Big Man's grandmother made brown sugar pies, and it seems they were gooey. This one had more of the consistency of our buttermilk pie. We may need to tinker with this one a bit more before we unleash it on the family reunion.

Cupcake had to work late Friday, so we stayed in and made another pizza.

Between working in the garden and making pickles, we still found time for a couple of projects. We made another batch of mint toothpaste, that should last us another three months or so. We also made another gallon of laundry detergent.

And while we were cutting mint, we cut enough for another round of lye soap. We either used or gave away our last batch.

Nineteen new bars of mint soap

We ended the week with wings.
K&K