Lawman gets some Tail

 We've updated several times about how our guineas go feral from time to time. Our little white guinea tried to hatch another nest of eggs, and got got overnight. But, the predators paid a high price. 

We were out running the DT's one morning, minding our own business, when we found white feathers. We knew something got our little mom to be.

We followed the trail of feathers and found where the final meal took place.

The Boy has a trail camera out, so we looked to him for intel on what we were dealing with, and found a red fox and a gray fox had been in the area. Lawman when to work.

He put out a dab of fox lure and took up his sniper position on the front porch. In less than three minutes, red foxxy blundered into the kill box. Lawman went and retrieved the body then went back to his spot. About an hour later, gray foxxy made the same mistake. Lawman chalked up two predators before bedtime. And we go to bed early.

Since some people are squeamish about dead animals, we just show the trophy tails. Lawman has the heads out for the bugs to clean off for him, he's going to start a "heads of our enemies" collection out front.

Inside stuff this week, Lawman whipped up the annual trial run of choco cake, which always takes place the last weekend of October.

The forecast called for rain one day, so Cupcake made a big ol batch of veggie beef soup, using up some of last years deer meat to make room for this years fresh deer meat.

After dinner we decided to pressure can the leftovers, so we have two more dinners and a lunch saved from the batch. And if it feeds you twice, it's worth the price.

While we were in town doing our trading this week, we found cast iron casserole dishes and cast iron pie plates. We added these to the collection.

The holidays are going to rock. Cupcake has requested a pecan pie for the maiden run of the pie plate.

We also found a cute beer at the grocery store that we had to try.

It says it's brewed in Baltimore. Lawman is kind of familiar with the greater Baltimore area but has never heard of it. More research may follow. Or not. We'll see.

Cupcake also found a recipe for "million dollar garlic dip" that we wanted to try. We like garlic, we like the idea of a million dollars, it seemed like a natural fit.

We're going to let it set up overnight before we dig in to it, but right after we made it Cupcake reported it might go 100K, but not a cool million. 

And we end the week with our persimmon haul for the year. We had three dozen or so green persimmons early in the summer, but between birds being assholes, bears being bears, and chickens being a pain, we ended the year with five. We picked these five because we watched the chickens jumping up and pecking holes in #6 last night. For a bunch of birds we've struggled to keep alive all year, and who still have not provided us our first egg yet, they sure do get in to stuff they shouldn't.

We ended the week with naps.

K&K

Ya Got Meat

 That's what Alvin York's younger brother says when Alvin kills a turkey at a shooting match during the movie "Sargent York" and Lawman says it every time he kills a deer. Or a turkey. This time it happens to be deer. But before we get to the deer, we start off with one of our projects from a few weeks ago. Vinegar.

Cupcake put on a batch of home made apple cider vinegar when we were doing the apple pie filling a few weeks ago. This week we cracked a jar open to enjoy with a meal.

And we did a new project this week as well, pear honey. The bears were nice enough to leave us a couple dozen pears on our tree out front, so we picked them and pondered what to do with them. We don't have room for a single jar of jelly left in the jelly cabinet, so Cupcake found a recipe for pear honey. We diced the pears up, added some sugar and pineapple juice, then slow cooked the batch all day until it reduced down to the consistency of honey. It's pretty close to the taste of honey as well.

We made another round of dinner rolls this week. We like them and use the leftover rolls for treats for the DT's. We're convinced they would take hostages if they didn't get a roll before bed.

Another acorn egg yolk

We had fried oysters with the dinner rolls. And as tradition holds, we tell the story of how "The Outlaw" would make fried oysters when Cupcake was a wee lass. His were nasty, Lawmans rock.

From here on out, there may be pictures of deer in less than Disney conditions. Don't read past if harvesting meat ain't your thing. You've been warned.

Lawman took to the trees again this week, and as luck would have it, a first year doe happened by. Cupcake has been wanting a couple of deer roasts to slow cook, and this little gal has just the hams for it. So our plan is to leave the legs whole and use them for a crockpot meal sometime down the road. Cupcake rolls up her sleeves and dives right in to the cleaning and skinning process, so from recovered deer to in the cooler was about an hour of work for us. We are a well oiled machine. 

And during the process of cleaning the deer, Cupcake made a request.

"For God's sake, don't mess up that backstrap"

She loves her some deer gravy on Sunday mornings.

And we are such a well oiled machine that we didn't get a drop of blood on our clothes this time. But to look at the wagon we use to dump guts and whatnot, you'd think it was a messy affair.

The weather is going to heat up this coming week, so we may have to wait a bit before we get another one, but six is out target for the year. We want our veggies back.

We ended the week with tenderloin gravy, and naps.

K&K

Duck and Chicken Cock

 The "Boy in law" hooked us up this week with some fresh duck meat. He killed it, cleaned it, and dropped it off. Lawman butterflied the meat up and seasoned it for a couple of days before he gave it a quick sear on the Blackstone. While it was getting happy, a delivery came.

Our pal Alphageek made a strong case for making Manhattans with rye whisky so we decided to follow his recipe and give it a whirl. We also like just a wee dram of bourbon from time to time, so there's a little something for all of us here. We will report on our take of the Manhattan once we get the rest of the ingredients. 

And what's a fine meal of fresh duck without fresh made dinner rolls?

The recipe called for a fresh large egg, so we used a fresh duck egg. When we cracked it open, the yolk was almost black. We thought it had rotted. We cracked open another one that we just got fresh that day, and it too was almost brown. We did a quick interweb search and learned that when ducks eat acorns, there is a dye in the acorn that causes fresh yolks to go dark. So we wasted one fresh egg, but we learned a little something along the way.

The duck was so good, we saved a few slices and made duck gravy for Sunday breakfast. Over fresh made biscuits of course, and not those "crazy granny" from a can biscuits.

Lawman got skunked again this week on the fresh deermeat front, but we did lay in some supplies for the coming winter. We picked up a big ol bag of potatoes, onions, pinto beans and October beans.

We ended the week with a couple of naps.

K&K

Stargazer

 We tried to get a picture of Jupiter over the full moon this week. Our little blog camera just aint got the chops for it. But it sure was pretty to look at.

Deer season opened up this week, but the first three days it rained. Day four, Lawman took to the trees but got busted by the wind. We hoped we would have some venison on ice by now. Maybe next week?

Lawman took advantage of the cooler weather and cleaned out the slanty shanty.

We love our ducks, but they sure do make a mess of the coop. The plus side to a coop full of duck poop, we have plenty for the gardens. Lawman cleaned off the barn garden, stored the fence parts and tomato cages, then cleaned it off so we could start dumping the coop litter on it for next season.

This time of year we would normally be camping somewhere, but 46's economy kept us home this fall, so we fired up the camp ring and did dinner over the fire one night. 

We hit up the local country store this week and found a sugar cured ham. We've never fixed a sugar cured ham for Christmas before, so we picked one up. 

We ended the week with a couple of naps.

K&K

Spirit of Crazy Granny

 The spirit of Crazy Granny came through The Acre this week. 

The Boy and The Girl-in-Law got a hankering for cookies, and they went with the tried and true crazy granny recipe. Store bought dough.

To counter balance that karma, Lawman whipped up a from scratch pumpkin roll.

The Boy also found an old time milk jug and fixed it up.

Cupcake has to keep the mums on the porch. We planted them along the front of the house, but the chickens ate all but one. And the one that comes back each year that the chickens didn't enjoy eating, the ducks make sure to ruin each year.

We had a wet weekend, so we put a pot roast on the slow cooker and hunkered down. The best part was leftovers. We decided to slice it up and make sandwiches on the Blackstone with a pot of cheese dip.

And we ended the week with a couple of naps.

K&K