Celebrating and Canning

We had our annual visit from "The Good Doctor and his wife" this week. Every 4th of July we invite them out for a bite and to get caught up. Lawman enjoys a reason to make desserts, this week he made two.

Cheesecake and chocolate pie were both from scratch, and seemed to be a hit with the guests.
Instead of our usual smoked brisket, we changed things up and had pulled pork and pulled brisket. We start them in the smoker to add a little smoke flavor, then we finish them off inside. The pork shoulder we finished in the crock pot, the brisket we finished in the cast iron dutch oven.

Add a little home made BBQ sauce to each and we had a pretty decent 4th.
The last smoking we did was a roaster chicken. Lawman picked it and froze the meat. This week Cupcake wanted chicken salad for lunch, so thats what she got.

Lawman took a day and played with his new toy, a steam juicer. We found some cherries locally and have had them in the fridge for a while taking up real estate. He dumped them whole into the juicer and steamed them for about thirty minutes. He got enough juice for two batches of cherry jelly.

By mid week we picked a handful of green beans. Fraidy Mutt loves her some fresh green beans, so we rationed these out as front porch treats for her.

Saturday morning we woke up and were planning our day. We started the day off with nothing to do, so we had breakfast and sat on the front porch enjoying the break in the weather. We decided to check the garden after a big day of rain on Friday.
We found a basket full of goodies. Cucumbers, green beans, tomatoes, squash, peppers and kale.

We broke the beans and canned them in pints for Pop, he says pints are just the right size when he wants a quick meal, and he was almost out of pints. Then we found a recipe for canned squash. We canned this picking up so we didn't waste any of it. They will be squash casserole come Thanksgiving and Christmas.

The cucumbers were highly anticipated. We've been getting one or two at a time, just enough to keep us in cucumber water during the week. Now Cupcake had enough to do a canning of lime pickles. So that's what we did while we waited for the canning to get done.

It's a four day process, so results will be reported next week.
We ended this week with "Ant Man and the Wasp" then wings.
K&K