"Lock the Doors"

 The big Floyd County Christmas parade was this week. And one sure way to freak out Cupcake is to have this guy come walking by the truck.

Clowns freak her out. And she did lock the doors, BTW.

We got a nice clear picture of "The Boy" driving by in brush truck 3.

The obligatory band picture....

And other parade related paraphernalia 

Our neighbor up the street

Cousin Eddie took a break from emptying the shitter to say hello to folks along the way

As is Floyd Christmas Parade tradition, we bought candied apples from the candied apple lady.

Thanksgiving was also this past week. We always pull out the bone, even if it was only for us this year. 

Smoked turkey

Scratch made dressing, with scratch made cornbread.

Smashed potatoes, with our farm raised taters

And a few scratch made desserts. Pecan pie and choco pie, along with chocolate cake and boiled custard, so Cupcake wouldn't take hostages

Then we throw it all together

The boy has to have punch

Dressing, Mac n Cheese

Half eggs and sweet potato casserole 

Smashed taters and gravy

Chicken nuggets and home made rolls

Cupcake's soon to be world famous corn pudding

Keeping with turkey day tradition, we boiled the bones for broth then we canned the broth up for future endeavors.

18 quarts of bird broth. It's a good start

We did not get our weekend naps in this week, so we went to bed early after the parade.

K&K

The Time has Come

This week we kept our tradition alive. When the McRib comes out, we always get one. Just one. Then we wait for them to come back next year. 2021 is in the books.

You may remember a few weeks ago, we made several quarts of home made grape juice? Cupcake loves her some home made grape juice, and has a jar every Sunday with breakfast. We were coming down to the end of our juice, so Lawman bought a big box of black seedless grapes and made her some more juice.

And while we have grapes on the brain, we did some work on ours. We developed a fungus on our Concord grape vines a few years ago. It started out ruining just a few grapes on each cluster, but got worse each year. We tried to treat the vines with fungus spray, but nothing worked. Research on the situation shows the only way to get rid of it it so cut it down, burn the vines and ground around the plants because the fungus spores get in the dirt and come back each year. We caught a couple of warm days this week, so Lawman got to work.

Lawman hit on the idea that he would cut the vines off, then hook his tow strap to the chicken wire that the vines had grown across, and "peel" the chicken wire off the stand. Then he could replace the chicken wire and let the new growth climb back up. It was a good plan, he thought.

One good tug from the Silver Hornet, and we changed the plan.

The whole shootin match came down. Which may be a good thing, something that rotten would have come down sooner or later. We will just start over, if the vines come back. We pulled the whole thing down to the brush pile.

One other thing that went off the rails this week. The Dudley Twins. 

We run the DT's to the barn every night, then down by the ponds, up to the chicken coop to lock up the birds, then off to bed. Saturday night, they were making the trek toward the coop, and both took off chasing something, but broke off and they were waiting for us at the coop. When we caught up with them, we figured out what they were chasing. A skunk. Both of them got a dose to the face.

So we had to do damage control quick. The old wives tale of tomato juice wasn't going to do, Cupcake said right off the bat "We're not wasting my tomato soup on this" so we went to the interwebs. We learned that peroxide and baking soda was the way to go. And since Lawman seems to think he can fix any wound with peroxide and gauze bandages, we had plenty on hand. The mixture worked. The boy came home later that night and said he couldn't smell anything inside house, so we dodged a bullet. Never a dull moment around "The Acre."

Food related stuff this week. Cupcake made a cranberry ketchup, then we had pork chops for dinner so we could use it.

Every Saturday is pancake breakfast day. We like to mix things up with pumpkin and pecan, blueberry, apple, something to shake up the flavor. This week, we used up one of our left over persimmons.

Friday the weather was kinda rotten, so Lawman took a day inside and made two batches of lye soap.

We ended the week with a couple of naps.

K&K

 

New Additions

 This week we added some new blood to The Acre. We saw an ad for a farm looking to give away some Americauna birds. We've had Americaunas before and loved them. Foxxy Foxx eliminated them from our happy home. Anyway, we schlepped out to Buffalo Mountain and picked up our new birds. 

As luck would have it, one of the birds is a rooster. We're going to try our hand at hatching some new chicks come spring.

And on the thread of eggs, Lawman whipped up the first batch of boiled custard and choco cake. And none of that from a box, crazy granny choco cake. These are scratch made with duck eggs.

Home made vanilla is da bomb

Cupcake's grandmother made boiled custard each year and would keep it on an enclosed porch. Keeping with that tradition, we do too. "The Outlaw" could be all up in it, but he chose poorly.

It's whats for dessert.

Non egg related stuff this week, we dug the potatoes over at the barn

And last but not least, we had DT drama.

A few weeks ago, Augustus got in to something, we don't know what, but his face swelled up. We panicked, called the vet and were loading him up to see the doc. Doc said relax, feed him a few Benadryl and he'd be fine. Next day, he was.

This week, Willow strolled in the house swollen up like a tick. 

Normal, happy Willow

I did bad, Bunk

We doped her up and by the next day she was back to normal. We still have no idea what they are getting in to.

We ended the week with a couple of naps. And boiled custard.

K&K

Our Christmas Jam

 Actually, it's Christmas jelly, but thats a secret so keep it to ya self.

We made sixty jars of jelly this week. To tell the truth we made it in a few hours. Some of you may remember we take bits and pieces of fruit over the summer and freeze it then make a hodgepodge of jelly every holiday season, we call it "Christmas jelly." This was the week. We pulled out probably ten gallons of frozen fruit and dumped it in the juice steamer. This thing has changed our lives.

This years fruit includes:

Apple

Grape

Pear

Peaches 

Persimmons

Rhubarb

Cherry

Ground cherry

Blackberry

Blueberry

Raspberry

Strawberry 

Plum

Cranberry

Goji berry

Viking berry

Crab apples

Black Arkansas apples

And everything except the cranberries came from our own farm. We are blessed and we know it.

We had eight packs of sure-gel saved up, but it wasn't nearly enough for all the juice we had. So we decided to go ahead and juice all the fruit and save the leftover juice for next weekend. We think we have enough for another sixty jars.

Before we started on the jelly, we butchered up the deer from last weekend. We ground up another fifteen pounds of burger and added twenty more packs of backstrap and tenderloin to the freezer. 

Lawman has this backstrap fillet thing down pat

We don't know why people eat pig when they could be eating deer

We left out one batch of tenderloin, because tenderloin gravy is Cupcake's favorite 

We think a couple more deer, and we will be all set for meat this coming year. 

If you tuned in last week, you know we cut up the deer leg bones and made bone broth out of them. The broth wasn't dark enough to suit Cupcake, so we slow cooked it another 24 hours and Lawman canned it up Monday morning.

A full canner, 14 quarts

Before our hard freeze, we got our last fresh garden salad from the garden salad patch outside the garage.

We've still got a pretty good stand of spinach out there, frost won't hurt that, so we may have a few spinach salads left this year?

Getting into the spirit of the season, Lawman began his baking practice. This week, he made a from scratch sweet potato pie. He added pecans, because he knows Cupcake loves her some pecans.

Go ahead, say it's store bought crust

First use of our home made vanilla 

A little mouse sampled the pie before we could snap a pic

We ended the week with Cupcake wrapping Christmas presents, sweet potato pie, and naps. 

K&K