Most of our days lately are spent on house/home repair/improvement projects.
If we ever finish any of them, I'll post pics.
Coop news: back in March we had a couple ladies go broody - Buff and Ms. Frizzle.
Buff kept getting off the nest when I came to feed, so I wasn't sure she was serious, so I gave her some fake eggs to start with.
Ms. Frizzle has not gone broody before, but I forgot she wasn't her mother, so I assumed she'd stick with it, and gave her three of her own eggs, plus one from a green layer and one from a blue layer.
She sat on them good for several days, but then I came to the coop two different times to find her sitting in the wrong nest on the wrong eggs, and her setting eggs were cold.
I figured the setting eggs were ruined, but she was sticking to brood, so I bought her a dozen (minus one) French Black Copper Marans eggs to set and put her on them inside a cage so after she ate/drank/pooped/stretched her legs, she'd go get back on the right eggs.
I put the eggs I figured were ruined under Buff, adding another - not ruined - green and blue egg.
For a reason I can't recall right now, I decided to throw out two of the Frizzle eggs I figured were ruined. (But not the third Frizzle egg, or the green or blue egg. I can't recall my reasoning.)
Anyway, one evening (the 14th) I went to feed the chickens, and checked on the eggs under Buff, and SURPRISE!
A witty bitty, 5-toed, feathered-legged Frizzy baby had hatched!
Buff didn't give up on the other eggs, so she's still sitting on them, and we're still waiting to see if anything comes of them. The at least last two added
should hatch in the next 5 or 6 days, maybe.
Meanwhile, Ms. Frizzle says, "Yeah, I'm over this lame gig", and starts breaking the eggs, and scattering them around the cage, and no longer setting on them.
I figure they're ruined, but learned not to assume, so I kicked her out and moved Buff and her chick and her four eggs into the cage, and she's setting them and the 5 remaining FBCM eggs left.
*************************************
A few years ago, when I started canning apples from my Dad's orchard, I made a variety of things, like applesauce, apple butter, jam, pie filling.
My Mom also made apple butter (because it was easy to make in the crockpot with little to no work involved), so between us the family was set on apple butter for...a real long time.
Apparently I'm the only person that still eats apple sauce, and no one seemed to appreciate jam or pie filling, either.
So, I stopped making stuff, and started just drying the apples.
Dried apples keep for a really long time, are great for snacking as they are, or if you want to make anything like apple butter or a pie, all you have to do is re-hydrate them.
Awhile back, my neighbor-lady that brings food scraps from the food pantry she volunteers at, brought me 7 pounds of good Pink Lady apples (and something else I can't recall at the moment).
I had planned to dehydrate them, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.
At Mom's, at Easter, I guess we were eating dessert, or? I can't remember, anyway, my sister commented something or other about my canned apple pie filling.
She says to me, "You know I'm addicted to your apple pie filling, right?"
I had no idea.
I had the idea it was not much liked by anyone I had shared it with.
So, one cold- or otherwise ugly- weather day, I cut up the apples and made my sister 5 quarts of homemade apple pie filling.
She tells me she makes a cobbler out of it. Pours it into a dish, mixes up flour, sugar, milk, (and butter?) for a crust and pours it over the pie filling and bakes it.
*******************************************
Yesterday, Ryan somehow got a hankering for gingerbread, of all things.
I didn't really have anything in particular planned for this morning, and with it a chilly 40's-something temp, I whipped him up a loaf of gingerbread.
(I have a complaint, though. The other night I was watching "Nailed It", and the contestants had to cook a wedding cake, and one of them sprayed her pans with cooking spray and one of the Judge Chef's said, no, no, always use butter. I usually use shortening, but still experience sticking sometimes, so I figured I'd take the Expert's advice and grease the pan with butter. But it still stuck. Booo.)
While I was messing around in the kitchen this morning anyway, I had been wanting to make DIY Pineapple Ice Cream topping.
We had DQ for dinner a couple weeks ago, and their ice cream treat prices are CrAzY high!
Yeah they're good, but geez!
My favorite ice cream treat is hot-fudge-pineapple sundaes.
Smucker's makes a pineapple ice cream topping, but I wondered how difficult it would be to make it at home. Turns out, not hard at all.
I even already had a can of crushed pineapple on the shelf (because sometimes I make banana pudding with crushed pineapple instead of bananas).
All you do is mix the pineapple juice from the can, sugar, and Karo syrup in a pot, bring to boil, reduce heat and let it simmer about 15 minutes until it thickens some, then add in the pineapple and cook another 2-3 minutes.
It tastes
exactly like DQ's or Smucker's pineapple topping. Really good, if you're a pineapple topping fan. (Oddly enough, I saw complaints posted about the recipe, because people "weren't fans" of pineapple. Well, what the heck are they...ugh. Never-even-mind.)
The "hot fudge" I used is the homemade chocolate milk syrup mix I make and keep in the fridge for, you know, making chocolate milk. It's not all thick and fudgy and whatever, but it was hot (after I microwaved it a few seconds) and chocolately and very good with my pineapple topping on Aldi vanilla ice cream.
*If you're interested in any of the recipes of the things I talk about, I found them all on the internet.
There's a good chance they're pinned in my Pinterest boards.
All else fails, ask me.
