What’s Been Coking in my Kitchen?

 

 

While I was cooking up my soups Leanne and Sierra made a triple batch of apple cinnamon muffins. I bought a 20lb box of organic Fuji apples on my last Azure order and have been working to use them up. We have eaten a lot of apples, made 3 apple pies and now 3 dozen muffins. The box is almost gone now..  

 

I don’t have a recipe for her coffee creations printed down yet.. maybe someday! 

That is all the cooking for today!!  Hope you all have had a pleasant and blessed Sunday on your homesteads!

First Day of Advent

Advent is a term from the Latin word "adventus" which means "arrival".  It is a time of waiting for the arrival of Christmas, the coming of Jesus to earth when he was born as a baby at Bethlehem about two thousand years ago.

Advent is the new year of the Christian Church and the church season that leads to Christmas Day.  Advent is the time when Christians remember that Jesus came into the world 2000 pears ago and that Jesus also promised one day to return in all His glory.

I'm not sure where this year has gone, it seems like only yesterday that we brought out our Advent wreath and lit the first candle.  And here we are one year later....so much to be thankful for.  And now the anticipation of Christmas.  This is one of the most exciting times for our family...we enjoy all our usual traditions and the preparation leading up to Christmas Eve is an especially wonderful time.  

I would like to hear how each of you begin to prepare for Christmas...and what do you do for each Sunday of Advent? 

And so it begins

Tomorrow is December 1st and with that begins the gift giving for me. I not only have Christmas gifts to purchase but I also have over a dozen or so birthdays, including my husband and three kids. This madness will continue untill my dd's  26th birthday on January 31st. There is almost one every week with 2 nephews, 1 niece, my 3  kids, one dh, 2 brothers in law, a mother in law, a brother, a best friend,  and a cousin or two for good measure.  With times being the way they are, some of these special people will get some baked goods and maybe a card or two.  All this gift giving also comes with a whole lot of baking added in too. That's not too good for someone who is on a diet, ME. I think that's going to be the toughest of all things to handle, not being able to eat cake and other goodies. Oh oh.

   Well the weekend was a rainy one for a couple of days, so Zach and I decided it was a good time to take out the Christmas decorations and do up the house.  I ended up going through each box and decided that I had way too much "stuff", so I've put aside a car trunk full of thrift store donations. It's all still good stuff that I hope someone else might need. I tend to keep ALL the handmade thing-a-ma-jigs that the kiddos made growing up. You know how that is, you just can't let go of those. That's the stuff you give to your new son and daughters in law. LOL I can't wait for that.

   I waited untill today to do the outside of the house. I had to go get some new red ribbon and bows for the porch post. I love the red, green,  and white look of decorations. I'm not much for shinny items or too many lights. I don't remember the last time I put lights on the outside of the house, probably years ago when my son Eric was helping and climbing the ladder for me.  Since I broke my foot five years ago, I do not climb up anything higher than a chair, and even that gives me the willys. LOL.

   Well everyone has finished supper, so I'll head off to do some dishes. Then later I think I  will pop some popcorn and catch a Christmas movie or two. I saw White Christmas last night, LOVED it.

Here piggy ,piggy, Kristi and Ee

I am sharing pictures of Kristi and her pet sow Ee.  Ee is from our old sow Tuna.  Kristi picked Ee out as soon as she was born.  She told us with her cute little smile and batting her eyelashes " this is my baby".   With that cute look how could we say no.   Her brother begged Kristi so much to let him have her, but Kristi held firm on it, NO!!

This is Kristi and Ee when Ee was about 3 weeks old:

Don't they look cute!!

Here is Ee on her 1st birthday.  Kristi made her a birthday cake :

Here is Kristi playing with Ee at night:

Here is a head shot of Ee next to Kristi:

Kristi hurt her knee one day and the Dr told her no horse back riding for 2 weeks.  So what does she do??? See for your self :

A real piggy back ride!!  We took a picture to show her Dr. her "New ride".   Our Dr. knowing our family ( a bunch of smart butts, Dr. is also one)  just laughed and went around showing the nurses and other Dr.'s her new ride!!!

Here is Ee's mom Tuna:

Last we have some of Ee's puppies (babies I every baby a puppy)

One more. This is Ee with her children Tommie and Heffa:

We still have Ee and Tommi , but we sold Heffa to a neighbor.  We did not have enough room in our freezer for her.

God Bless, mj

Update on Christmas cards for soldiers

After my post a few days ago about sending cards to Recovering Soldiers, I found out that is not going to work.  Walter Reed gets so many that they cannot handle them, so the Red Cross has a program to distribute cards in many areas.   Following is some information and the address to use.  Please disregard the previous post I made, sorry for the confusion. 

Also note that the cards must be sent by Dec. 10!

Another thought I had was to plan to do something for patients in your local V.A. hospital.

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Tuckered out

That's what we both are tonight!  Hubby announced this morning that he was going to back a trailer into the shed and we were going to start cleaning it out.  Well all I could say was WooHoo!   I should have taken a picture of the mess we had, but honestly it was a little too bad.  It is a shed that is open to the south and we use it for shelter for the goats.  They have been using the front half, but there was a cattle panel across the middle and the back half was total junk!  When we moved here 71/2 years ago, we stored things we didn't know what to do with there..........well, you know boxes got damp and gave out and stuff just got to be a total mess.  I have had the best intentions every year to get it cleaned out so the goats could use all of the building as well as just getting the junk cleared out.  But everytime I looked at it, it just seemed like too big of a job to start on myself, so I would just walk away.  So when hubby was in the mood to start on it this morning, I was overjoyed!  A lot of work, but a good tired at the end of the day.  I am guessing we burned 10 or more trash bags full, plus some boxes that we just carried to the burn pile.  Besides a trailer pretty full of stuff to haul to the dump tomorrow.  There is a huge pile of used lumber along one side that my Dad had stored there, so we will have to start on that tomorrow too.  We are thinking some of it may be no good, but some can be  salvaged.  Then of course there is a row of "stuff" that we want to keep that will need to find a home before we can say we are finished. I doubt that we can finish it tomorrow, but we sure have made a good start and I am thrilled.

This shed is where we hold the Live Nativity that we host each year.  So that is another reason to be happy to get this project done now before Christmas.  Past years we have just hung a tarp across, covering up the mess.

Today was a perfect day to work outside, we were out of the wind, so not cold, but just right to work and not get hot either.  There was very little wind, so we were able to keep the burn pile going and get rid of the burnable stuff right away.

One more blessing to share with you.  I send out a newsletter from our farm, and in the one I did last week I added a wish list of things we could use here that folks might have laying around and want to get rid of.  Included was a baby monitor,  jelly jars, concrete wire, and pieces of chain link fence to cover gates.  In response, a friend emailed and offered some fencing.  We borrowed a trailer and picked it up yesterday when we were in the area for Thanksgiving.  There was part of a roll of wire, several hog panels, some are bent, but we cut them up and use the pieces for hay feeders, a chain link walk thru gate, some steel posts.  And they also gave us 2 rubber buckets, a rubber feed pan, some metal wash tubs.  I think that is everything........  We were so happy to be blessed with these items and she told me she had wondered for 2 years what she was going to do with this stuff.  So we helped her out as well.  Isn't God Good!!!

I have 2 pies to bake by noon tomorrow.  Being busy all day and worn out tonight, I was very happy that I had made an extra single pie crust last week and put it in the freezer.   I stirred up  the filling for a custard pie in no time and it baked while I got the dishes from the day caught up.  In the morning when I have a little more energy, I will make an apple and be done baking till Monday I hope!

Country Blessings,

Marilyn~at Heritage Hill Homestead

What to do with Turkey Leftovers

Friday on the Homestead

Well we are in Thanksgiving home recovery mode today! LOL.. Time for clean up and then bringing out the Christmas decorations. I have already decorated my website and blog!  

We had a very nice Thanksgiving. It was just the kids, Tobin and me and Tobin’s dad came too. The food was delicious. We ate dinner at about 3:00 and then I took a nap.. Funny how turkey does that to a person  . While I napped the kids and Tobin played Taboo. Then we moved onto pumpkin and apple pie. Emily was in charge of table decorations and she did such a nice job. Here is a pic of the table and place settings…

 

 

And one of Isaac being his silly little self

 

I ate leftovers for breakfast!

Everything went OK yesterday, the turkey was a hit. I saw on one of the shows on the Food Network, they put a sliced orange and a sliced lemon in the cavity of the turkey to help it stay juicy. Well it worked! I also used some cajun injector for seasoning the inside of the meat, that too adds so much flavor. So it was a hit, thank you God, lol.

I, as usual, made too much food. I sent some home with my daughter, fed some inlaws, twice, ate supper, fed strangers that stopped by to say hello, and STILL had tons of food left.  The strangers were only strangers to me, my dh knew these men from work. Grinding keeps going on 24/7 here, there are no holidays as for as the mill bosses are concerned. Things keep running. So there were truck and tractor drivers that were stopping by the house to say hello, and I felt bad and fed them.  My husband did put his foot down on not giving away the coconut cake tho, lol.

So what do you do  with all the cornbread dressing you have left, you eat some of it for breakfast.........and lunch.............and supper. If there is any left by the end of the day, I may have to give some it the cats. LOL

I will be heading out later to face the crowds at Wal-mart, ONLY because I need a new toilet seat and some packing tape. Otherwise, I wouldn't face the crowds. I'm not one for all this shopping madness. Besides, I looked threw all the sales papers, and there wasn't anything that I wanted, lol.

Have a good day, and be safe if your out in the craziness.

Parade of Christmas Trees

Welcome everyone! I hope you had a FANTASTIC Thanksgiving.  I know we did.  Family time, fun and of course wonderful food.
On Wednesday night we went to my husbands grandparents house... and we have many young ladies on my husbands side of the family... beginning with Cameo who is now 11.5 ;), then we have a 10 year old niece, an 8 year old niece, a 6 year old cousin, then Carlie Jean who is 4, and then the youngest cousin who is 2.  So I thought, how fun it would  be to have a craft for the girls and I to make together.  So I gathered the items and we made the gumdrop trees on the left.  I thoroughly enjoyed myself and I think the girls did also... needless to say, they wearied about half-way through... it can be a long project if you make your tree as full as I did mine. But they did great and it was really fun to make.
I got my idea for the tree from the wreath I made last year from gumdrops.  Remember?
For the trees, I used a styrofoam cone and a bag of gumdrops and quite a few toothpicks that I broke in half.  So fun!
The other two trees I found are The recycled magazine Christmas tree and the Curled Paper Tree.
After lunch yesterday at my Mom's we made the gumdrop trees also and then made the 3-D snowflakes and some paper stars (which I will share with you next week) :) I have to keep something to bring you back... haha. :)
 I hope you all have an amazing weekend.  We will be busy with preparation for our Sunday School Christmas party that we are having here.  Yes, pictures will be a must. HA! Have a great day!
My Cup Runneth Over...