We've been talking about expanding the run for ages. Technically speaking, the enclosed run is big enough for our 8 girls. But... who doesn't like a little more space, right?
Our plan was to "some day" dig up the back fence and move it back to the alley which will give us a ton more space. Who knows when we'll get around to that big project though! Finally, in October, we decided to give them what space we had.
We had to move out piles of rocks, gravel, bark chips, wood, etc! But in the end, we had some very, very (very!) happy girls.
In the new year to come, may you all be as happy as chickens with a whole new run!
Friday, December 31, 2010
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Basement pantry
In our first root cellar at the last house, we stored all our root vegetables as well as our canned things. In my last root cellar post I mentioned that this could sometimes be a little scary if things got very cold. We didn't want our canned things to freeze - and possibly expand and crack jars.
So this time Jeremy built the shelves for the canned things on the outside. We had a mess of canned goods in various places around the basement and it was a real pain finding anything.
The week after Thanksgiving Jeremy finished the shelving...
...and about half an hour after he was done I'd organized everything!
We've got the dehydrator, canners, car boys (for when we make booze some day), and lots of canned things: pickles, peaches, pickles, relishes, pickles, pears, applesauce, pickles, chutneys, beans, jellies, chutneys, jams, apple juice, chutneys & pickles! Somehow it doesn't looke like much, but those jars are all four or five deep. Behind the concrete pillar we have the apple juice, beans, and some mystery item I can't identify in the picture.
It felt very good to get everything out and organized and take stock of what we have.
So this time Jeremy built the shelves for the canned things on the outside. We had a mess of canned goods in various places around the basement and it was a real pain finding anything.
The week after Thanksgiving Jeremy finished the shelving...
...and about half an hour after he was done I'd organized everything!
We've got the dehydrator, canners, car boys (for when we make booze some day), and lots of canned things: pickles, peaches, pickles, relishes, pickles, pears, applesauce, pickles, chutneys, beans, jellies, chutneys, jams, apple juice, chutneys & pickles! Somehow it doesn't looke like much, but those jars are all four or five deep. Behind the concrete pillar we have the apple juice, beans, and some mystery item I can't identify in the picture.
It felt very good to get everything out and organized and take stock of what we have.
Blogging... oh yeah...
It has come to my attention that my devoted fans (one of them at least) would really like it if I would post something again!
Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Things have been very, very busy for me (and I thought for sure I had posted something a few weeks ago...) but now that the holidays are over I should be back to regular posting again.
I have several now historical posts to share about things that happened months and months ago! But there isn't much else going on around here...except snow and more snow and planning for the coming year.
I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and I hope you're all ready for 2011!
Okay, okay, I'm sorry. Things have been very, very busy for me (and I thought for sure I had posted something a few weeks ago...) but now that the holidays are over I should be back to regular posting again.
I have several now historical posts to share about things that happened months and months ago! But there isn't much else going on around here...except snow and more snow and planning for the coming year.
I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and I hope you're all ready for 2011!
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Happy Thanksgiving!
This is a Thanksgiving table runner I made for my mom. I actually made it for her birthday (which was last month) and I got it in the mail to her in time for Thanksgiving. =)
But the bigger gift, I think, is that I get to be home for Thanksgiving this year! Now that is something to be thankful for...
Love the material on the back of the runner:
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Apple Dumplings
The apple dumpling tradition continues. This year of course we couldn't do it on Thanksgiving because I'll be home! So we invited a bunch of friends over for the Sunday before. There are so many more people in town the Sunday before Thanksgiving versus Thanksgiving day!
I think we fed 12 or 13 people. I made a double batch of dumplings, and still several of us only had halves.
There always has to be a glitch though, right? So last year it was cooking the sugar sauce till it was like toffee or hard caramel and then apples were a bit dry. This year I did the sauce right, but the oven decided to heat unevenly. And I mean really unevenly. After about 45-50 minutes of cooking I was checking an apple on the far right of the pan and it still felt hard, like hardly cooked. So I kept cooking, and cooking, and checking. Apples still hard. But for some reason I never looked over at the apples on the left side of the pan (a mere 8 inches away) until I realized they practically melted they were so cooked! And even though they'd turned to applesauce, the apples on the other side of the pan were still tough! So weird.
So for the next batch I turned the pan around three times while cooking and it worked like a charm.
Our friends came out, braving treacherous icy roads, and brought hot cider, banana bread, waffles, raspberries & blueberries with whipped cream, crustless quiche, and bacon. One of our friends brought over a new box of Yorkshire God tea. My hero!! We never buy the Gold because it's more expensive. And it's so darn good, we can't get used to drinking that and then go back to the regular. =) So I made pot after pot after pot of tea.
And of course we used Jeremy's great grandmother's china again. We ran out of chairs in the end and it was pretty packed with all of us in that kitchen.
My grandparents did up their will before my grandma died 9 years ago. I'm going to get their dining room table some day complete with leaves for extending the table and 8 chairs! It will be such a moment when all our friends gather around my grandparent's table and use Jeremy's family's china and my mom's recipe for apple dumplings.
(Of course it will also mean that my grandpa has passed which will be very sad. =( )
Anyway, here is the recipe which I didn't share last year.
Mom's Apple Dumplings
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
In a saucepan, combine 2 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Bring to a full boil, occasionally stirring. Set aside. (Which means turn the heat off!)
If you're sharing this task with someone else, they can peel and core 6 apples. Dip them in lemon-water or vinegar-water which keeps them from browning.
Combine 3 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt in a bowl. Cut in 1 cup of shortening (butter, Crisco, etc) until coarse crumbs form. Sprinkle mixture with milk while tossing with a fork, adding enough milk until soft dough forms. (This will be between 2/3 to 1 cup of milk.)
Shape the dough into a log and cut into 8 equal pieces. (The extra pieces are for decoration.)
Roll out each piece on a floured surface – round shape is ok. Place an apple in the center of each pastry piece and you can put a littl butter in the hollowed out apple. You can put some brown sugar and cinnamon mix in the core, but you don't have to. Mold the pastry around the apple – press edges to seal. Repeat with rest of apples.
Place in ungreased pan – one big enough to fit the apples so that they don't touch each other, and deep enough so that when the sauce bubbles up it won't overflow. At this point, you can whip up a bit of egg white and brush dumplings with this. Roll out the rest of the dough and cut out some leaves, make veins with tip of knife, tip one end in the egg white and then press onto top of dumpling.
We usually do 3 leaves to an apple. You could have someone else cutting out the leaves and getting those ready while you form the pastry around the apples. When all pastry has been brushed with egg white, (and sprinkled with a bit of sugar if you want – not too much), pour the sauce around the dumplings and bake at 375 degrees for 40 – 50 minutes, until the apples are tender and the pastry is brown. If the apples are not done yet and the pastry is getting too brown, cover with a piece of foil.
Don't those just look good enough to eat!!
We usually roll up some dough for a stem in the apple, which I didn't do in this last batch. And, I've always cut out bit leaf shapes and cut in the 'veins' like my mom's directions say; but this year I used a tiny cookie cutter Jeremy got for me of an oak leaf. Took way less time!
Can't wait to have these again on Thanksgiving morning! =)
I think we fed 12 or 13 people. I made a double batch of dumplings, and still several of us only had halves.
There always has to be a glitch though, right? So last year it was cooking the sugar sauce till it was like toffee or hard caramel and then apples were a bit dry. This year I did the sauce right, but the oven decided to heat unevenly. And I mean really unevenly. After about 45-50 minutes of cooking I was checking an apple on the far right of the pan and it still felt hard, like hardly cooked. So I kept cooking, and cooking, and checking. Apples still hard. But for some reason I never looked over at the apples on the left side of the pan (a mere 8 inches away) until I realized they practically melted they were so cooked! And even though they'd turned to applesauce, the apples on the other side of the pan were still tough! So weird.
So for the next batch I turned the pan around three times while cooking and it worked like a charm.
Our friends came out, braving treacherous icy roads, and brought hot cider, banana bread, waffles, raspberries & blueberries with whipped cream, crustless quiche, and bacon. One of our friends brought over a new box of Yorkshire God tea. My hero!! We never buy the Gold because it's more expensive. And it's so darn good, we can't get used to drinking that and then go back to the regular. =) So I made pot after pot after pot of tea.
And of course we used Jeremy's great grandmother's china again. We ran out of chairs in the end and it was pretty packed with all of us in that kitchen.
My grandparents did up their will before my grandma died 9 years ago. I'm going to get their dining room table some day complete with leaves for extending the table and 8 chairs! It will be such a moment when all our friends gather around my grandparent's table and use Jeremy's family's china and my mom's recipe for apple dumplings.
(Of course it will also mean that my grandpa has passed which will be very sad. =( )
Anyway, here is the recipe which I didn't share last year.
Mom's Apple Dumplings
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
In a saucepan, combine 2 cups water, 2 cups sugar, 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg. Bring to a full boil, occasionally stirring. Set aside. (Which means turn the heat off!)
If you're sharing this task with someone else, they can peel and core 6 apples. Dip them in lemon-water or vinegar-water which keeps them from browning.
Combine 3 cups flour, 3 teaspoons baking powder, and 1 teaspoon salt in a bowl. Cut in 1 cup of shortening (butter, Crisco, etc) until coarse crumbs form. Sprinkle mixture with milk while tossing with a fork, adding enough milk until soft dough forms. (This will be between 2/3 to 1 cup of milk.)
Shape the dough into a log and cut into 8 equal pieces. (The extra pieces are for decoration.)
Roll out each piece on a floured surface – round shape is ok. Place an apple in the center of each pastry piece and you can put a littl butter in the hollowed out apple. You can put some brown sugar and cinnamon mix in the core, but you don't have to. Mold the pastry around the apple – press edges to seal. Repeat with rest of apples.
Place in ungreased pan – one big enough to fit the apples so that they don't touch each other, and deep enough so that when the sauce bubbles up it won't overflow. At this point, you can whip up a bit of egg white and brush dumplings with this. Roll out the rest of the dough and cut out some leaves, make veins with tip of knife, tip one end in the egg white and then press onto top of dumpling.
We usually do 3 leaves to an apple. You could have someone else cutting out the leaves and getting those ready while you form the pastry around the apples. When all pastry has been brushed with egg white, (and sprinkled with a bit of sugar if you want – not too much), pour the sauce around the dumplings and bake at 375 degrees for 40 – 50 minutes, until the apples are tender and the pastry is brown. If the apples are not done yet and the pastry is getting too brown, cover with a piece of foil.
Don't those just look good enough to eat!!
We usually roll up some dough for a stem in the apple, which I didn't do in this last batch. And, I've always cut out bit leaf shapes and cut in the 'veins' like my mom's directions say; but this year I used a tiny cookie cutter Jeremy got for me of an oak leaf. Took way less time!
Can't wait to have these again on Thanksgiving morning! =)
Monday, November 22, 2010
About that root cellar...
....it's actually been done for some time now. I've gotten behind on my blogging!
Last time you saw the walls go up and the insulation going in. Now the insulation is all done and the sheathing is all up.
Jeremy is quite proud of the ceiling in the cellar, which he pieced together from lots of different scraps. Whatever we can do to not have to buy new sheets of wood!
Stepping in the door you see our potato box to the right (with some garlic in bags on top of it), some bags of carrots, and our onion bins.
On the opposite wall are lots of apples in boxes of leaves and I think those are some squashes on our re-purposed Ikea shoe rack. The empty boxes on the left are waiting to accept more veggies.
This is what keeps it cold: a vent through the window coming right into the room. There's a damper in there so we can adjust the flow of cold air. The glass block window also has that window-vent in the middle that we can open to allow lots of cold air in. We painted the block a darker color to keep the light out, but I think I'll have to hang a curtain there to really keep the light out.
And this is how we keep track of it. 41 degrees in the chicken coop, 43 degrees in the root cellar. The chickens are just fine, but the root cellar could stand to be a little bit colder.
What's next? Jeremy is building some shelves on the outside of the cellar to hold all of our canning things. We kept our canned goods in the last cellar, but it's really not necessary. And it left us a bit worried a few times when the cellar dropped below freezing. We didn't want to accidentally wreck our canned things!
More on this when Jeremy finishes building and I finish organizing. =)
Last time you saw the walls go up and the insulation going in. Now the insulation is all done and the sheathing is all up.
Jeremy is quite proud of the ceiling in the cellar, which he pieced together from lots of different scraps. Whatever we can do to not have to buy new sheets of wood!
Stepping in the door you see our potato box to the right (with some garlic in bags on top of it), some bags of carrots, and our onion bins.
On the opposite wall are lots of apples in boxes of leaves and I think those are some squashes on our re-purposed Ikea shoe rack. The empty boxes on the left are waiting to accept more veggies.
This is what keeps it cold: a vent through the window coming right into the room. There's a damper in there so we can adjust the flow of cold air. The glass block window also has that window-vent in the middle that we can open to allow lots of cold air in. We painted the block a darker color to keep the light out, but I think I'll have to hang a curtain there to really keep the light out.
And this is how we keep track of it. 41 degrees in the chicken coop, 43 degrees in the root cellar. The chickens are just fine, but the root cellar could stand to be a little bit colder.
What's next? Jeremy is building some shelves on the outside of the cellar to hold all of our canning things. We kept our canned goods in the last cellar, but it's really not necessary. And it left us a bit worried a few times when the cellar dropped below freezing. We didn't want to accidentally wreck our canned things!
More on this when Jeremy finishes building and I finish organizing. =)
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Snow!
Okay, it actually snowed very briefly a couple weeks ago and then it was one week ago when we got our big snowfall - probably around 12 inches. It was apparently the biggest pre-Thanksgiving snowfall in 30 years. And since it was so early in the season the snow was incredibly wet and heavy. A lot of people lost trees and branches as the snow kept coming down and weighing everything down.
This is the view out the window-seat window, looking into the backyard. This is what we woke up to last Saturday morning.
And the only other pic, in the side yard.
I just love how the snow sticks to every last surface. It even stuck to every bit of bird netting we have outside!
Jeremy and I worked hard the week before the snow getting the garden cleaned up and put to bed. (The chickens helped with this of course.) The last thing we did was to get some old storm windows and put them around three sides of the chicken coop and tie them down. This way the chickens still get light, we get to see them, and they are a bit more protected from snow drifts and wind.
So we're pretty much ready to settle in for the winter I guess. Just in time: it's supposed to start snowing tomorrow and Monday, and then we should be getting a bunch more snow for Thanksgiving!
This is the view out the window-seat window, looking into the backyard. This is what we woke up to last Saturday morning.
And the only other pic, in the side yard.
I just love how the snow sticks to every last surface. It even stuck to every bit of bird netting we have outside!
Jeremy and I worked hard the week before the snow getting the garden cleaned up and put to bed. (The chickens helped with this of course.) The last thing we did was to get some old storm windows and put them around three sides of the chicken coop and tie them down. This way the chickens still get light, we get to see them, and they are a bit more protected from snow drifts and wind.
So we're pretty much ready to settle in for the winter I guess. Just in time: it's supposed to start snowing tomorrow and Monday, and then we should be getting a bunch more snow for Thanksgiving!
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