Our Life Together: Ocean Spray is Not The Way

Ever walk through a grocery store and wonder to yourself, where do all the cranberries go after the holiday season? They come to The Acre to become cranberry juice. Well, they will after this week. Cupcake saw a recipe for homemade juice, and we found cranberries on sale after the holidays for a dollar a bag. It seemed like a great fit.

The recipe called for the juice to be made in a water bath method. After we did two batches of juice that way, Lawman wanted to do a pressure canner. We did the berries the same way, but used the pressure canner at 10lbs for 10 minutes and got pretty much the same results. So we went out and bought ten more bags of berries, and two more cases of jars.

We got creative and tossed in some blueberries and raspberries in a couple of jars. What's life without whimsy? We made a total of 40 quarts in two days. Now it has to sit for six weeks before we can drink it. It will be ready just in time for Cupcake's birthday.

After we got our Christmas snow, the birds wouldn't come out of the coop until it melted a bit and during the two days they stayed holed up, we didn't get any eggs. We figured they ate the eggs since they refused to leave the coop to eat. Lawman saw a trick he wanted to try on the interwebs. He took two eggs we had saved up, drilled holes in the ends and blew out the egg.

Then he took a meat injector and filled it with mustard, then filled the eggs with mustard and put them back in the nest box.

The next day we had two mustard eggs gone, and two fresh eggs waiting for us. Word on the street is, chickens hate the taste of mustard. So far, so good.

A couple of food related updates this week. First, the boy tried his hand at making his own sausage gravy for dinner one night.

He ate it all, so it must have turned out pretty good.

Cupcake wanted a citrus pound cake for New Years, so Lawman broke out the flour and made her a cake. None of that Duncan Hines from Crazy Granny for us. First he zested a lemon and an orange.

Then the magic happened. One hour later, we had cake.

Then he used the orange and lemon for juice to make the glaze.

After the juice was extracted, he put the leftover orange and lemon into a pot with a little clove and whatnot for a scent boost in the kitchen. Nothing wasted.

We had Chinese food one night for dinner, in honor of our new political overlords. Lawman made dumplings from scratch.

We fried some, we steamed some.

Cupcake made pork fried rice with a couple of leftover pork chops and Jasmine rice.

For New Years day, we stuck with family tradition and used our leftover ham bone to flavor up a pot of black eyed peas, and a big ol pot of collard greens.

The garden is still feeding us into the new year.

Our last trip to Rural King, we found a big ol box of Russel Stover candies on sale for half off. It was full of "mistakes" so there was no chart to go by. We thought it would be a difficult thing to not know which candy was what flavor, but Cupcake found a quick solution to the problem.