Let the Canning Begin

One of my favorite times of the year is here!  Woo Hoo!!!  It is canning season.  It is such a family affair.  The family that cans together, stays together.  Lol!  The entire family gets involved.  I love when the kids are in the kitchen helping.  It teaches them cooperation and patience, not to mention all the great science lessons.  I think it is very important that we teach our children how to be sufficient in living off the land.  It is definitely a much healthier lifestyle than fast foods.  When they have a part in the process, it gives them a sense of pride and accomplishment when they see the end product.  It makes Friday night pizza nights more special when we spread that homemade sauce on the dough that we made ourselves and we top it with fresh or dried tomatoes grown in our garden.  When we pop the lid on a fresh jar of dill pickles, it makes your mouth water.  Yes, it takes work and time to do all these things.  That is where the patience comes in.  In today's world, it's easy to loose that character trait.  We want instant gratification, however, the best is always worth waiting for.

Okay, I think by now you have figured out that I really love canning so for the next few weeks, my canners will be permanent fixtures in my kitchen.   Now let me share with you what we have been doing.  The tomatoes are plentiful right now so pizza and spaghetti sauce are a high priority.  We use a lot of both and our goal is to put away enough to last us the entire year.  Yep!  I know that is a lot of canning but you just can't duplicate the great taste from a Hunts tomato can off the grocery store shelf.  We are also drying tomatoes with fresh basil from our garden.  These make excellent snacks for the kids and they give a super fresh pop to many of our favorite dishes, like stir fries, soups, and salads, to name a few.  Again, you just can't buy that fresh flavor!  Another favorite, is fresh dill pickles.  Yeah, we are a sour bunch.  Lol!  We all love our dills.

Permanent  stove fixture

Pizza Sauce

Sealing the sauce and pickles

The finished product!

Fresh tomatoes/basil ready to be dried

We will also be making some yellow tomato jam and blackberry jelly this week.  My son and I love the jam poured over cream cheese and then spread over some ritz crackers.  Mmm, mmm, good!

In between all the canning, we are still processing our broilers. I cannot express how great it is to have pasture raised chicken back in our freezer.  You can read more about this process on our Broiler Adventure pages.

 Yesterday was a very exciting day for us.  We sold our first order of 30 broilers.  It was a lot of work but we were very pleased with the end product and packaging.  The bonus of this sale was getting to see some long time friends of 10+ years.  They drove down to the farm to pick up their order and have lunch with us.  Papa Roo cooked some scrumptious venison burgers, the boys shot their bows and guns, and Chicken girl did her thing in teaching them all about the chickens.  The adults had a great time catching up with life events over the past years.  I am so grateful for the friends we have met through out our military career.  Without the moves, we would have missed out on a lot of blessings.

Well, there is much to do today so I better go fire up the stove!

Papa Roo's Pacific Adventure

It has been quite the busy summer for our family.  We all went to TX to close on our property in May.  The kids and I went back to TX for a couple of weeks in July to help our family during fireworks season.  We arrived home on a Saturday evening and I took Papa Roo to the airport at 7 am the next morning.  He was gone for two weeks traveling all over the Pacific region for the Air Force.  During his travels he was able to see and do some very cool things.  I won't bore you with details but I will share some of the awesome pictures he took.

Arriving in Hawaii

What a backyard view!

Looks delicious! 

Paradise

The Conference held in Korea this year

De-militarized Zone
The area between North/South Korea

DO NOT retrieve your golf ball!

Our dear sweet neighbors in Okinawa

All the kiddos

The restaurant owners!

What a special bond our family has with our friends in Okinawa. Papa Roo contacted them via email about his trip.  They in turn put together a dinner at a friend's restaurant for a long awaited reunion.  They had the entire restaurant to themselves.   The only thing missing was the kids and I.  We did get to face time with them, which was very, very cool!

Views of Tokyo from the helicopter

Welcome home Papa Roo!

The Hitchhiker!

On Sunday, June 23, my son and I went to Tractor Supply to purchase a two week supply of chicken feed so Papa Roo didn't have to worry about running out while we were gone.  After all, his plate was going to be full juggling all the farm duties along with his full time government job during our absence.  Our shopping trip turned out to be anything but normal.

While waiting at the red light leaving the shopping complex, a gentleman in a truck in front of me got out and started walking to my van.  I rolled my window down to hear what he had to say and he proceeded to tell me he had just seen a yellow kitten fall out from under a car and it ran under his truck.  He was afraid to move in fear of running over it.  My son and I got out to help him look for this kitten.  In the mean time, the light had turned green and traffic was stacking up behind me.  While still looking, a truck driver came from across the parking lot and shouted, "I saw the kitten!  It went under your van ma'am."  Oh that is just great!!!  Me, the animal lover.  Me, the one who picks up dogs off the side of the road, now has a kitten under my van!!!  I am not moving!  Sorry folks!!!  You will just have to go around.  Well, we looked for about 5 minutes and never saw or heard a kitten.  My hope was maybe it just ran under my van and out the other side towards the grassy area around McDonald's.  Surely someone would see it and pick it up.  We had to get moving because we still had to stop by Costco's and then get home and finish packing for our trip.  With a saddened heart, I got back in my van and put it in drive.  I was just sick that we had not found the kitten.  Poor thing!  We drove about 2 miles down the road to Costco's.  It took us about 45 minutes to gather the items we needed and check out.  Knowing I was still upset about the kitten, my son said he would load the van while I looked for the kitten again under the van.  I know, I know.  I just needed to come to terms that the little thing gave us all the slip in the Tractor Supply parking lot.  We got in the van and headed down I95 for the next 8 miles, the busiest interstate I have ever driven on.  After making it back home, we unloaded our van and I told Papa Roo the reason it had taken us so long at the store.  I was just sick about that poor kitten!  I had to get refocused.  We were leaving in the morning and I had so much to do.  I was feeling a bit overwhelmed!  After steadily packing for about two hours, I headed out to our RV to get a couple of things and I hear, "Meow!"  Okay, I must be hearing things. "Meow!"  There it was again.  I ran back to the house and told my daughter I just heard that kitten under my van.  We looked and looked but saw nothing.  We didn't hear anything either.  My children thought I had lost my mind!  Then, there it was again, "Meow!"  Ah ha!  I was not crazy!  Then it started answering my daughter.  My son got a flashlight and tried to get under the van but it was too low.  I ran to tell Papa Roo, who was up on the hill at our shooting range with some friends.  He said, "We are not keeping a cat!"  Great, just great!  This little kitten just hitched a ride down I95 under my van and survived.  Really?!  Well we at least had to get it out.  Fortunately, we had a pair of car raisers so I backed the van up on them, which gave my son room to crawl underneath.  And there it was, a little yellow kitten crouched down on a beam under my van.  There was barely room to reach up and grab it.

Do you see it?

I got it I think!

 So now we had this kitten and we were leaving on a road trip tomorrow for two weeks.  What to do, what to do.  Papa Roo says, "Take her to Aunt Debbie.  She is not staying here!"  Sounded good to us.  The kids were excited.  We got an old dog kennel, made a litter box out of a disposable baking tin, grabbed a cat bed from one of our cats and a couple disposable bowls for food and water, a ziplock bag full of litter, and we were set.  Ready or not little kitten, you were going on an adventure!  It wouldn't top the last one you just had though.

I'm not sure what it thinks about this.

Feeling a little more calm about this ride.

As we were driving, we were trying to come up with appropriate names to fit the situation.  ( Scalawag, Stow Away, Gypsy, Hitchhiker, Lucky)  We didn't know if it was a male or female.  No worries, we would google it later once we got settled in the hotel.  Oh, wait!  How were we going to get a kitten into a hotel room?  I have to admit, we ended up sneaking it by putting it inside one of our bags.  The kitten was so scared, it didn't make a sound.  Once in the room, the little thing enjoyed it's freedom and comfort.  Now we needed to do a bit of research. After googling how to determine the sex, we made our best guess.  Hey, it's not as easy as a dog and we had a 50/50 chance of getting it right.  Lol!  Our guess was that it was a boy so we decided on the name Hitch, short for hitchhiker.

Oh yeah, I'm free!

When we reached our destination, Chicken Girl's cousins were very excited to see we had brought a kitten with us.  For the next few days, I don't think the poor thing was put down except to sleep at night in the kennel.

The 3 L's and the kitten

Since the girls were playing with this kitten nonstop and we knew nothing about it, I decided to take it to the vet to make sure it was healthy, verify the sex, and find out the approximate age.   I am not sure what the vet or the technician thought when two adults, three energized girls, and a tiny kitten all came walking into the tiny exam room.  He asked what the kitten's name was and the girls told him, "Hitch" and then we proceeded to tell him the story about how we found him.  Then the he said, "Well, I think you have a very rare kitten because I think Hitch is a girl! (Told ya we had a 50/50 chance!)  The reason she is special is because 90% of most yellow cats are male, just like most calico cats are female.  Wow!  We also learned that she was about 1 month old and healthy, except for the ear mites, which the vet took care of.  We walked out with three very relieved girls and the conversations began about choosing a more girlie name like Sunflower or Gypsy.  When all was said and done, Hitch was still Hitch.

By the time two weeks had gone by, Chicken Girl was head over heals in love with her new found friend and fortunately Aunt Debbie wasn't prepared to take on a kitten just yet so we brought Hitch back with us.  She was much more relaxed on the van ride home.

Sleeping in her momma's arms

When we got home, I told Papa Roo that Hitch came back with us.  He asked, "Who is Hitch?"  I said, "The kitten."  His response, "Oh, I already knew that."  Now our home is balanced, 3 dogs, 3 cats.  Oh and we can't forget the one fish, two turtles and 55 chickens!  Yeah we love our farm life!!!

Hi, my name is Hitch
and I am one lucky cat!

Road Warriors

Wow!  What a road trip with the kiddos, 2720 miles round trip. They are such ROAD WARRIORS!  I am so grateful we started teaching our children the art of traveling early in life.  We are definitely reaping the rewards.  It doesn't matter if it is a 20+ hour flight to Australia, traveling space-a on military aircrafts, or driving in a van for 12 hrs at a time, they always choose to make it an adventure.  Of course, the technology and electronics kids have these days sure make it much more adventurous.  Heck, we adults tend to take advantage of it too.

We left for the Texas coast two weeks ago to help our family out during fireworks season leaving Papa Roo behind to tend to the farm, all while commuting to and from his full time AF job at the Pentagon.  I have to admit, it seemed a bit strange since the kids and I are usually the ones left behind to hold down the fort.  And of course, as he always does, Papa Roo handled it all!  He even found the time to sharpen his canning skills.  I am so blessed to have this man as my husband.

Canned Pickles by Papa Roo

Our first stop was at Crystal Beach to drop my son off to help our aunt and uncle sell from their beach side location.  He was able to fish in the morning and sell/shoot fireworks in the evening.  Talk about a teenager's dream job.  I have to say, I am very proud of the young man he is becoming.  I was able to witness first hand him interacting with customers and getting them excited about the products.  When you know what you are talking about and love the product yourself, it is easy to make a great sale!!!  If any of you following our blog is ever at Crystal Beach or Lufkin, TX during a fireworks season, stop by the several locations of the Pyro Shack and make your holiday special!

One of two of the Crystal Beach locations 

One of three of the Lufkin, TX locations

After dropping my son off, the Chicken Girl and I headed north to Lufkin to spend time with our cousins and my mom.  I was blessed to be able to care for three beautiful girls while their parents worked the fireworks stands.  My tongue stayed twisted all week.  Lol!  These three cousins all have names that begin with the letter "L", so I just call them the Triple Ls.  Boy did we make some memories!  I won't bore you here with all the details, however, I will share a few photo moments.  Family is our primary reason for moving back to our hometown after retirement.  We cannot wait to continue making memories!

Fishing with a friend 

Collecting shells 

Checking out the view with Aunt Debbie

Feeding the seagulls 

Chilling out for the evening with a little TV

Future Pyro Shack Employees

At the Lufkin Zoo

A little mud does the soul good

The 3 "L"s and Hitch

Hitch (hiker)
She deserves a post all her own!

Mud Mask #1

Mud mask #2

I got the Mud mole!

Cheap carnival ride!
Thanks Home Depot

Dress up time

A little shopping at Claire's 

Doing a little shopping with Grandma Brock 

Grandma is rocking the air guitar!

It's a Papa's T-Shirt kind of night! 

Hanging out at the "Troll Bridge"

On a mission to see Despicable Me 2 

Ta Da! 

And that folks is only a peak at the fun we had over the last couple of weeks.  Now we are back on the farm and the rains have been passed back as Papa Roo focuses on his AF job.  It is good to be home.  The kids and I  have missed all of our animals.  Now that we have taken a couple of days to recharge our batteries, there are projects to do, vegetables to pick, and more memories to make!