Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Broccoli salad

At last week's neighborhood potluck, we had a new family attending who brought a broccoli salad. It was so delicious I had three helpings (I ate nothing else!) and I even brought some extra home, which I had for breakfast the next day. I begged them to send me the recipe, which they kindly did.

As with most salad-style dishes, ingredients can be adjusted to account for personal tastes and preferences.

Here is the original recipe they sent:

4-6 broccoli crowns
1/4 lb. bacon bits
2 cups shredded cabbage
2 cups craisins
3/4 cup sunflower seeds or pine nuts
1/2 red onion

Dressing:

2 cups mayonnaise
2 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 Tbsp sugar
2 Tbsp Italian Seasoning
1 Tbsp basil
2 pinches of salt

In a large mixing bowl place broccoli, craisins, red onion, cabbage and sunflower seeds. Cook up your bacon in diced pieces. Drain off most but not ALL the grease.

In a small mixing bowl mix up the ingredients for the dressing. Add to salad mix, then add remaining bacon with a little bacon grease.


Here's the thing: I adore broccoli. I also adore onions. Anything that mixes these two vital ingredients together is likely to be a huge hit with me.

So today I made my own rendition of their broccoli salad. I shredded half a cabbage...


...and cut up a bunch of red onions. These are the last of the red onions from our garden, and I was glad for an excuse to use them up, since they're starting to go bad (red onions don't have a long shelf life, at least not without a root cellar).


Broccoli. Yummm, lots of broccoli.


I threw in about a cup of sunflower seeds.


I had bacon bits in the freezer, so I scooped out about 3/4 cup and popped them in the microwave for a few seconds to thaw.


I'm not a huge fan of craisins, so I skipped that ingredient.

This is the resulting dry mix.


Then I mixed up the dressing. Altogether the recipe listed above makes a huge amount (think potluck!), so dial it back if you want a smaller amount. As it was, it filled my biggest mixing bowl almost to overflowing, so I ended up transferring things to a three-gallon pot so I could mix without slopping stuff over the edge.


But the results -- ooh la la -- absolutely delicious. Don and I have been snacking on it all day.


This would be an excellent summer dish for when the garden produce is ripening (not to mention a cool dish for hot weather), but since it has both broccoli and onions, I don't care what time of year it is -- it's going to become a staple in my kitchen repertoire.

Sunday, October 28, 2018

Fall chores

Until a few days ago, October was a very dry month for us. Thankfully some much-needed and very welcome rain is moving in.


While it's delightful to walk outside and sniff the fresh moist ground, we weren't idle during the dry weeks. Among other chores, we focused a lot on firewood, a chief preoccupation for many people this time of year.

Summer before last, we had a neighbor come in with some huge equipment and clear out a lot of dead trees from the wooded side of our property.



He piled the burnable debris in big burn piles and put the salvageable logs in another pile just below our corral.


We've been harvesting firewood off that pile ever since. In the last few weeks, Don's worked hard to cut it all into rounds.


When enough rounds are cut, we load them into a small trailer hitched to the tractor bucket, and bring them up into the driveway to split.



We've been repeating this process for several weeks now.



We're stacking some of the split wood in the barn:


We're stacking some on the side porch:


And we're stacking some on the front porch:


We have room to stack lots more in all three locations, especially since we moved the kindling box from the front porch to the side porch...


...giving us more room on the front porch.


We always keep the hatchet in the kindling box for splitting kindling as needed.


A funny thing happened yesterday while Don was cutting rounds below the corral. He had on headphones and was listening to a recording of some Christmas choral music (he's participating in a performance in a few weeks), and was singing the bass vocals at the top of his lungs. I was in the house so I couldn't hear him -- but suddenly I saw all seven cows gallop madly across the field and disappear behind the barn. Don came in chuckling a few minutes later and told me all seven animals had gathered in a circle around him as he sung, apparently fascinated by the music. "Let's see if they'll do it again," I said as I grabbed the camera.

The animals weren't quite as cooperative the second time round, but they were still pretty funny.





(I think this is known as "singing 'til the cows come home.")

Even our neighbor's cat stopped to listen to the impromptu recital.


At least, until the cows spotted the poor kitty and went barreling over to investigate.


This hearkens back to an earlier blog post about music soothing the savage beast, when I sang to Amy while she was nursing the orphaned calf Anna.

And speaking of Anna, here she is double-dipping off her full sister, Pixie, who's also nursing her own calf Peggy. (Anna is the dark calf, Peggy is the dun calf mostly hidden behind Pixie.)


Despite the crushing loss of Polly earlier in the year, Anna has fended very well for herself, thanks to the generosity of other cows sharing their milk.

We had more rain due yesterday evening, so I decided to clean the chicken coop, a long-overdue task.


The cows watched me with great interest as I dumped the debris into the compost pile.


By the time I finished spreading fresh hay in the coop, it was dusky...


...and the sky was getting thicker as clouds moved in.


It was pleasant to lie in bed last night, listening to the rain on the roof and knowing the chickens had a comfortable cozy coop.

We have one recuperating bird in the coop. A week ago around 9 pm, I heard a commotion outside. I grabbed a flashlight and went out to find a great horned owl standing on the carcass of one of our young hens (from this summer's hatching). I chased off the owl and picked up the bleeding hen, and tucked her inside an inner pen in the coop to either live or die.

By the light of the flashlight, here's some of the blood from the hen...



...as well as some lost feathers.


This little hen, along with some other birds, roosts in an overflow pen adjacent to the coop. The door to this pen isn't solid, so once in a while an owl will swoop in over the top of the door and drag out a chicken. Hooking a sheet over the door each evening works (if the owls can't see the chickens, they don't go in). I just hadn't started hooking the sheets up yet this fall. You can bet I am now.

Anyway, the young hen survived her encounter with the owl, and while she's now on her feet, she's wobbly. She might be fighting a leg fracture, I'm not sure. We'll keep her quiet and isolated in the pen for a couple more weeks and see how she does.


Anyway, that's some of what we've been up to lately as winter approaches.

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Cute Darcy pix

Lately I've been managing to snap some awfully cute shots of Mr. Darcy. Enjoy!






Shadow on the kitchen cabinets.


A couple of my favorites:



We call this his "vulture" position, as he waits for us to throw a stick.




The bigger the stick, the manlier the dog -- right?




When a stick isn't available, a pinecone will work in a pinch.


Couldn't find a stick, so this roll of bark will have to do:





And that's your Mr. Darcy dose du jour.