The past few weeks

I have been a bit busy the past few weeks.

In addition to learning how to process chickens I went to a cheese making class with a few of my city girlfriends. I have transplanted lettuce plants, planted more garlic, fertilized my garden & went to several estate sales. And I've made more pepper jelly & tried my hand at monkey butter (thanks to SciFiChick for that last one - it's delicious). Greg brought home his label maker from work to make it easier to label my jars. You get tired of writing the same thing over & over for each jar but I definitely want them all labelled as I don't want to guess what's inside, much less the date it was processed.



Label

Pepper Jelly & Monkey Butter








And I made meat stock. I took kymber's advice & just threw in all my meat bones (beef, pork & chicken), vegetable pieces that I had stored in the freezer & even added crock pot juice. You know, the extra juice that is made when you cook a roast in the crock pot. I never use it all to make gravy & used to just throw it out but decided to freeze it for stock. I had both beef & pork juice. I threw it all in my big stock pan & cooked it for about 2 hours. I then strained it & put in my big crock pot with the bones, with the lid ajar, for about 4-5 more hours. I strained again & pressure canned. What I got was 7 pints of a wonderfully aromatic & tasty meat stock.

Meat Stock

I was also able to stop in & say hello to my friend Stephen last week. I had a cup of coffee with him which was delicious. He says it was delicious because he adds egg shells. Huh, who knew? Anyway, he's such an easy person to talk with & we seem to get along well. We discussed his writing style & mine. His is much more 'sit down & let it flow' all at one time. Mine is more of the write a few lines, save, walk away, come back, write a few more lines, rearrange, walk away, come back proof & then publish. Unfortunately for him he is constantly interrupted which breaks his rhythm. I hope he gets some time to himself because he writes beautifully, from the heart.

This past weekend I took a basic pistol safety course through one of our local gun shops. It's the same shop  that I got my CWP from a few months back. This course was an all day class, with classroom time in the morning, a short break for lunch & then about 3 hours of range time at a FOP range & then back to the class for our test which we all passed, yeah! The range was pretty cool as we got to try several different types of hand guns. There were three different sections on the range.

1) Shoot at metal targets that pinged & either 'went down' when hit or flipped around to the other side. We used a 9mm on that one.
2) Basic target w/a long barrel .22.
3) Don't remember what they called this one but firing a .380 or a .40 cal ... shoot from hold down position - bring arms up, aim & shoot 1 shot to the middle, down, then up to shoot 2 shots to the middle, down, then up again to 2 shots to the middle again, down then up for 1 shot to the head.

I did best on the last one, I chose the .40 cal & hit all but 1 shot within the rings. The weather was the only bad thing, damp, windy & cold. But, all in all it was an enjoyable day.

I helped Greg inventory his today. I created a spreadsheet with the makes, models & serial numbers. He took pictures & got them stored on hard drive & thumb drive & will be printing a copy to put in a safe place.

And last but not least, we have been busy off & on, moving my In-Laws vacation trailer from it's current home to our country property. It's more work than you think & I'll post more on that later.

I'm off to try a new Cabbage recipe along with Sea Bass & Asparagus that Greg is cooking for our Sunday night dinner.

In case I don't get the chance to post again, I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!