Watermelon

We are having some "cool" weather today, it's only 87 right now!  Most of the garden is done, but the watermelon vine is just gearing up.  This morning I noticed that we have 2 teeny little melons on the vine...

I'm not sure if we have enough warm weather left in the year to finish them out...but it's worth a try.  Here's the second one...

And our visiting buck, Pete is here.  We love him so much he may become a permanent resident!

Downsizing

I am once again a day behind on blogging.  I am really making an effort to blog every day.  I use this blog as a journal and I'm really upset with myself for not keeping up with it, even if it's just a brief post every day.  I have a perfectly good excuse for not making an entry yesterday.  My friend and I spent the day looking at thriftstores.  It took a whole day to thoroughly gawk our way through 3 stores!  I love going to thrift stores for several reasons, but the 2 most important ones are that I can find great bargains, and secondly all the money I spend at the thrift store is put back into our community.

With just the 3 of us here now, I find it more and more difficult to downsize my recipes.  Especially when you consider that my 2 boys could eat as much as 3 grown men...each!  This is something that I have really been working on, since I can not stand to waste food.  As a result of this downsizing of meals, I have felt the need to downsize my serving bowls and dishes.  This may sound trivial, but when I work hard to prepare a meal, I like to present it at a set table that looks pretty.  Especially if you consider the fact that we grow much of what we eat, there may be months of preparation put into each meal.  So while we were on our thriftsore adventure I looked at serving bowls...and was thrilled with my new finds!  These 3 bowls look like they were a complete set, but we pieced them and their lids over the course of 2 separate stores!  Not a bad purchase for a total of less than $7 for the 5 pieces.

I also found this great soup tureen....I paid $7.49 for it but it is china.

The soup dish is a huge downsize from my other one....here's a size comparison...

And the other cool thriftstore find was this neat bread basket...worth the dollar I paid for it in conversation alone!

What a day for a Daydream...

We have started breeding the goats for 2011 kids.  It's also the time of year when we really look closely at each of our goats and see if they have any health issues.  We have a checklist that we go over to make sure they are in tip-top shape for breeding.

• Full body haircut
• Teeth check
• Check ears and eyes for discharge
• Hoof trim
• Fecal exam

Then we take some glamour pictures of them for the website.  Today was Daydream's day.  I call her my Dreamy girl because she is such a sweetheart to work with.  Give her a cookie and she will quickly forgive you for the indignities.

Home made

My oldest daughter came over for the day and we spent the day making bread together. 

And then we made more bread....

And more bread...

And rolls...

After all, we need something to put all these preserves on, right?

What a great day!

Cherry Almond Preserves

This year has been an amazing year for cherries!  We rarely ever get to put many of them up since they don't grow in this area, but his year has been a real treat.  They have been plentiful at the grocery stores all summer.  Ever since I made that batch of peach & pecan preserves I've been thinking about doing something similar with cherries.  I used 12 cups of cherries, wash, stemmed, and pitted them.  I put them in a big stockpot with 14 cups of sugar and just enough sugar to keep them from scorching (maybe 1/2 cup).  Meanwhile I took 1 pound of whole almonds and spread them on a baking sheet.  Bake them in a 350 oven for about 5-7 minutes until toasted, then add them to the cherry mixture.  Add vanilla extract (I used about 1/4 cup of my homemade vanilla) and almond extract (about 1/4 cup of homemade almond extract) and stir well.  Simmer over a low heat for about 3 hours, stirring occasionally.  Bring to a fast rolling boil and add 1 package of powdered pectin.  Boil hard for 3 minutes and then place into jars and seal.

Peaches

Things have been busy around here...what else is new, huh?  I've completely lost track of our food harvest tally for 2010.  I have all my milking records of course, but haven't added any of them up.  Math just isn't one of my favorite things to do, especially when there is plenty of work to get done around here.  Speaking of work, peach season is officially over....we did a couple of new things this year besides the usual peach jam and peach halves.  I made a peach & pecan preserve....

I made it using 8 cups of sliced peaches, 8 cups of sugar, 2 cups pecan halves...and a sprinkle of cinnamon sugar.  Place the sugar and peaches in a large stock pot (do not add water) and simmer over medium heat.  Put the pecan halves in a heavy skillet over medium heat and toast, sprinkle with cinnamon sugar just as they have browned then add to the peach-sugar mixture.  Simmer and stir over medium heat for about 2 hours until thick and bubbly.  Then put into jars and seal.  This is SO good and easy too!

We also pulled up the last of our baby carrots to make room for our watermelon vine.

And we've made the difficult decision to sell our California girl.  I am certainly going to miss her, and especially the 6+ milk she gives us every day....but we're focusing our breeding on another line, and I just cannot keep them all.  We're actively looking for the right home for her.