Tiny Houses, Big Tree / Little Tree & Stock/Broth

Wow, time does indeed fly by. Can't believe it's the end of the year already! Just a quick documentation of what we've been up to the past few weeks.

Went to a Tiny House Festival a few miles south of us. One of the most disorganized festivals we've ever attended. When we go to these things we usually go very early, get through & get out. We got to this one a bit late & the crowds were horrendous. Parking wasn't so bad but there was no rhyme or reason to it. The price of admission was ridiculous but we found out that the $$ were to go to various charities. So, in we went. We first encountered converted school buses & vintage cars & campers which were very cool.

However it soon became obvious that this was, as Greg called it ... a festival for the gathering of young & old hippies alike.

 By the time we made it over to the new tiny houses the lines were 30 & 40 people long!

Photo courtesy of FL Tiny House Festival.

We said, no thank you, walked around a bit more & then left to meet some friends for lunch.

The next weekend was Thanksgiving. We went to the country house & invited my In-laws over for dinner. We were supposed to eat around 2:00 but the turkey would not cook! The oven there has been slowly going on the blink & it decided to nearly stop working that day. We kept turning it up. It was on almost 400 degrees before everything finally got done. Well, the turkey never fully cooked by the bones but we got enough breast meat sliced to finally eat around 4:30.

We don't get much fall color in this part of the country but the sycamore trees usually come through with some. I planted one last year, I think. The big old sycamore in the branch was showing color & my little new one was as well. They matched, how sweet.

See the little one in the oh so brown field?

When we got back to the city I decided to go ahead & make poultry stock. I added a frozen chicken carcass to the turkey carcass. While I was at it I decided to go ahead & make some beef stock from some steak bones that were in the freezer. AND, while searching for the steak bones I found some raw pork, beef & lamb bones, so I decided to go ahead & make bone broth. I used the stove top for the poultry & beef stock & cooked/simmered it for about 24 hours. Since the bone broth needed to cook for about 48 hours, I used my trusty 18 qt. electric roaster for that (after roasting the bones in the oven for about an hour).

It took almost 4 days to cook, strain, sieve & can it all. The poultry stock came out the creamiest that I've ever made. The beef broth is ok. But, the bone broth is wonderful. I only had 2 jars of meat stock left in my pantry so this makes me happy to get this done. Here's a pic of the finished product(s) 52 pints total!

Poultry stock, bone broth & beef stock.

I think that catches me up for now. I'm in the process of shopping around for health insurance so got to get back on the web & phone to get that done, ugh. Next up is baking Christmas goodies.