ErkkilaDotOrg

State of the pantry:

• 9 pints sweet and sour pickles
• 4 quarts hot dill pickles
• 20 quarts tomato sauce
• 3 quarts + 15 pints corn and tomato soup
• 16 half-pints+ 1 pint salsa
• 2 4-oz of hot peppers (mostly jalapenos, some hot cherry, some habanero)
• 2 pints + 2 quarts tomato vegetable soup
• 12 half-pints + 3 cups cinnamon/nutmeg applesauce
• 10 quarts grape juice (refrigerated but not canned–we’ll drink it all pretty quickly :)

This represents about half the total food we canned–my mom took about the same amounts of the tomato sauce, soups, salsa, peppers, and applesauce as are listed above. We also gave a few cans away. We would have had more pickles, but the crock pickles went bad–probably too many cukes for too little brine.

Now I just have to figure out where to store it (small house, no basement, everywhere else freezes in winter). :) Yay, maybe I can get more computer stuff done; we’ve been canning almost every weekend from the beginning of August until now.

It falls quickly for guinea keets. (meanwhile Blanco/a gets cuter).

The incredible bearded women:

Guess what?

Another canning weekend. My mom and I did 14 quarts of spaghetti sauce. With any luck we’ll get that much more from her garden, then maybe we’ll buy tomatoes locally to do salsa.

This is our new rooster, Negra Modelo (or Sr. Modelo, or Macey). He is an Ameraucana, born earlier this year. We got him from the Klossners. He spends a lot of time stalking hens, grabbing them by the tail and then quickly jumping on them before Red comes over and knocks him off. We have him penned separately until Red stops attacking him on sight. He’s a really pretty boy; sure hope he works out OK.

We’ve been spending a lot of time trying to convince the chickens to go home to the new coop at night. They are conditioned to go to the old coop at nightfall, and it’s hard to break habits. Two nights ago we got all but 3 hens and Negra, then today it was just Negra (who had to be lured into the coop storage area using a hen).

At least two of the baby guineas are ker-plonking (hens). Whew. We’re still not sure if the white Ameraucana baby is a pullet or a cockerel; it acts kinda cock-ish.

Moving has not affected egg production. We have over 7 dozen in the fridge. Phil better get his ass over here or I’m going to have to distribute them at work.

The first tomatoes came in this week which means we started canning (although we did do a couple of batches of pickles already). This time it was Corn and Tomato Soup; soon we will be doing tomato sauce, salsa, peppers, and other tomato and pepper variations. Our crock pickles were a disaster; probably too many cucumbers and too little brine, so they went moldy. Oh well, maybe next year. Our cucumber vines had some kind of blight so we didn’t get many anyway.

I haven’t blogged in awhile. Just haven’t felt like it. :P

• I have ordered a bag that bites after seeing one on Jenna’s blog.
• Cupcake had a liver enzyme reading that was a little too high before she had her last lump removal/dental…but after taking her off her l-thyroxine (she’s hypothyroid) and cutting the ground beef out of her meals, it’s coming back down. *Sigh*. 3 small dogs over 10 and the big one going on 8. It will be expensive for awhile I think.
• Candy mania. I ordered Easter chocolate from See’s (can’t resist the various filled chocolate eggs) and more Japanese candy from J-List/Jbox. A little every day, that’s the key.
• We might go to Dublin (Ireland) later this year as that’s where the next IETF is being held. Whoot! (assuming Icky is not sick, in which case Paul will go but I won’t)
• Our future neighbor (lives in San Diego currently) called and rather sheepishly asked if his friend the mason had ever come by to build a chicken coop last year…nope, and we still have windows purchased for the project in our barn. But he himself is coming to town in April and is lining up work, and asked if we would like it built! So maybe we’ll be picking up a few more Ameraucanas after all! Maybe some Jersey Giants, too. /me crosses fingers for more green eggs in the fall.
• Squeak is out of the house and living with the silkies in the barn in a little swimming pool pen. Everyone’s happy not being picked on in the big coop. Hopefully in the new coop we can subdivide into pens for this sort of issue. Thank God. Squeak is cute and all but she’s terribly loud and smells horrible.
• Speaking of ’smells horrible’, the RIR hen caged in our kitchen better get her feathers back soon. OMG. She has gotten so friendly, though.

Oops, dinner.

The cookies keep on coming. My mom made gingerbread men (don’t have the recipe for that, maybe eventually I’ll add it) and I made a bunch of Bonbon Cookies. Mom had to make a bunch more of the Chocolate Marzipan Pinwheels and chocolate-dipped stars (Again, linked recipe is not the actual cookies made, which were from a Mrs. Fields book; but it’s similar. I’ll get around to adding the Mrs. Fields one, I hope).

Yesterday I also prepped Good Eats Beef Stew for today when Scott and Jenna and EJ visit; also am working on a pot of soup in case they wanted lunch (probably not, but it will certainly work for my lunch :).

I love having time off; finally time to cook and bake.

I had to wash poop off a rooster’s butt today (along with a lot of quill-trimming). I can’t say he was much happier about it than I was. Now I have to disinfect the shower. I’m just glad he took it so well (it’s Leo, the silkie that loves to attack my feet). He looked more confused than anything, then crowed up a storm in a guinea pig cage while he dried.

Got halfway through a project mounting a flat-panel heater (Shop the Coop) and a timed light in the coop and realized the 100 foot extension cord we bought was about 10 feet short. Had to go to Lowes in Macedon to buy a 25′ extension and parts to put the joined section in a weatherproof box. Maybe when the insulating/waterproofing foam dries I can plug the whole mess in and see if it works without setting things on fire (heater’s fused; using a thermal detection outlet to turn the heater on/off automatically; got a timer on the light, and a GFI power splitter, and lots of super heavy duty extension cord which is more than adequately rated for heater + light).

Waiting for the Pastitsio to be done now. Been meaning to make this for awhile and this is the perfect time, with an open bottle of red wine left over in the fridge. Don’t knock wine-and-cinnamon flavored beef until you try it.

Today:

Walked 1 hour.

Mom started ahead of time with Chocolate Dipped Stars. (Come to think of it, I don’t think she used that recipe, I think she used the Mrs. Fields recipe but I don’t have it in front of me right now).

Then we did the dough for:

• Ribbon Cookies
• Chocolate Marzipan Pinwheels
• Nutmeg Logs

Went home. Fed and walked dogs. Fed chickens. Cooked nutmeg logs and just barely finished in time to take Grep to the vet. While mom stayed at our house and cookied the pinwheels, Paul and I bought chicken feed, a small waterer and feeder for Squeak, peanut hearts for chickens, and rawhide for the dogs, gassed up the truck, and picked up a box from the post office. Went home. Helped mom dip stars and a few pinwheels in chocolate at her house. Went home and baked Ribbon Cookies. Ate leftover lasagna standing up in kitchen. Typed cookie recipes into wiki. Did this blog entry.

Imminent collapse. Putting off the Christmas cards.

After years of attempting to dry hot peppers by stringing and hanging them in the loft, we decided this year to go with a more reliable method. Lately it’s been staying warmer longer into the fall and thus the heat isn’t on as much, thus making conditions less favorable for drying…which means we’re lucky if half the peppers are in decent shape when it’s time to use them. Either they turn brown, or they mold, or they just look not so nice; especially the habaneros, which are very likely to mold. So we decided to pick up a dehydrator. A piece of advice…if you’re drying a huge batch of habaneros and jalapenos, you might want to put the dehydrator out on the porch or outside, if possible. Fortunately Pee suggested this ahead of time…our porch is now suffused with a powerful mace-like stench. But a few peeks have verified they’re all drying nicely (cut in half, but so far they’re holding their color nicely). I should try fruit leather next and see if it ends up with a peppery flavor; that sounds so good I might throw a jalapeno in the blender with the fruit!

Fortunately, this weekend has somewhat made up for the indignities of last week (see post of mammography)…

It must be fall:

• Honey crisp apples were available at The Apple Shed, along with fresh donuts, cider, and those dried bunches of indian corn to hang on your front door
• Red (rooster) is finally getting pretty feathers again after getting them all plucked out by our insane hens all last winter
• Lots of things to burn…especially after the clearing we’ve paid Mike Means to do. Rather alarmingly a lot, as Pee found out after lighting one huge pile on fire and having to tromp through the pine trees stomping on little smoldering spots started by floating leaf ash. But the wood smoke added tremendously to the general atmosphere of fall. Along with what must’ve been a large amount of carbon. :}
• Dark chocolate peppermint Starbucks Frappuccinos in bottles (whoot!), a seasonal flavor
• bright blue skies
• slight coloring on the trees, although they’re pretty crispy from the drought conditions this summer
• a new batch of easter pullets almost ready to start laying…just wish they’d hang out someplace other than the barn for now (poop machines)

We would’ve liked lower temperatures (60s F would have been nice), but otherwise, not bad.

Finally, one of the lilacs flowered nicely. Must have been the long spring or maybe the extra water from the new drip irrigation system last summer.

We met a future neighbor today (pee did a few days ago). They won’t be moving in for quite awhile but are flying back and forth to do some work to the place (it already has a beautiful new porch) . Should be quite a change from San Diego (probably cost less per square foot, too :).
There’s finally a halfway decent Mexican restaurant, El Pacifico, in Newark. It’s not quite this but an improvement over the last one in Palmyra. Looks like we’ll be doing that at least once a week, until, of course, pee gets a messed-up order and we can never go again (the dreaded restaurant curse).
There was another Rochester Small Dog event last weekend. Too bad I forgot an extra camera battery.

Rewind about 6 years. We had this loaf of whole grain bread that got past date (as will happen) yet remained curiously mold free. Just for fun, Paul wondered how long it would take before signs of decay/corruption would take place. So it ended up on top of a cabinet. A year goes by. It simply looked a bit shruken. Mummified, if you will. Two years. Occasionally we noted that it was still not in bad shape, and affectionately dubbed it ‘the experiment’. It occupied an honored position atop the fridge cabinet.

On another note, in the past year or two we noticed that occasionally, we had this problem with certain food items in one of the cabinets–even in bags still sealed from the store, if it was grain or nuts or rice, and we had it long, it would seem to grow webs and small worms in the bag (longer than that, and it was full of small moths). Ick. At this point we’d throw out just about everything in the cabinets unless it was in a thick, sealed plastic bin.

The other day, Paul made this horrifying observation: 3 of those little worms CRAWLING ACROSS THE KITCHEN CEILING. This is a job for shop vac…wait a few hours, a few more. Ugh. Emptied the cabinets again. I thought maybe the damn moths had laid eggs in the recessed lights or something.

My mom, being generally more willing to climb on top of the fridge than I am, today (during preparations for Thanksgiving dinner), found out that, plastic boring buggers that they are, those moths had invaded ‘the experiment’, which was now covered with little hatching cocoons. The good news is that we vacuumed up all the remaining worms and can rest secure knowing they’re not living in the ceiling/floor. Sadly, ‘the experiment’ is no more. While we are generally interested in science, forensic entomology is not something we want to mess with in the house.