08 May 2015

Busy week

This has been a rather busy and fun-eventful week so far.  Kicking things off, we celebrated our ninth anniversary on Monday by going up to Jacksonville to have a Japanese hibachi lunch with the in-laws.  Before lunch, hubby and I both went "book mining" at a large new-and-used bookstore called "Chamblins Book Mine."  After lunch, hubby dropped me back at the Book Mine while he went off to WalMart with his parents ... there are days I just cannot stomach the noise and crowd at WalMart, and Monday was certainly one of them.  Since the Book Mine is so huge, that gave me the opportunity to look at the cookbook section.  I quickly realized I needed to be extremely picky and choosy, or I might need a semi-trailer to haul home my purchase!  LOL  The theme for cookbooks turned out to be baking.  While I didn't find a bread-specific book I liked, I did get one dedicated to 200 years of American baking, which yielded a new honey wheat bread recipe I made yesterday (more on that in a bit).

Tuesday, our actual anniversary date, was dedicated to the chickens.  Along with caponizing in the morning, my neighbor Maria came over and bought four of the red broilers.  Two were definitely "por comer" (to eat) and one was the lighter colored broiler pullet she had been telling me was too pretty to eat.  The other broiler pullet she decided was also too pretty to eat once she had the bird in her hands.  It amuses me when she tells me my meat birds are too pretty to eat, as I have decided I just don't really enjoy raising ugly birds (like the Cornish-Rocks).

I made cookies this week, using a recipe from that "all-bad-for-you" cookbook and they came out nicely.  I did glazed molasses cake cookies, and they really did turn out cake-like.  Today I will likely be trying out a cake recipe in my new cookbook, which conveniently has a picture of a Boston cream pie on the dust jacket cover.  All I needed to do was hold the book up and ask hubby if he'd like "this" instead of the usual pineapple upside-down cake for his birthday.

Yesterday, one of hubby's friends came down from Jacksonville to hang out, game, and of course enjoy the food here.  Hubby made breakfast of bacon, toast, and poached eggs.  By luck of the draw, hubby's friend got the double-yolk egg.  He thought that was so cool.  He also showed up with an empty egg carton, which I cheerfully filled while joking that, "Every good pusher knows to give the first hit for free."  He agreed, and bought a second dozen.  When he asked the price, I suggested $3 a dozen, which he promptly shot down saying our eggs are worth $5 a dozen up in Jax.  So, he put a five dollar bill on our coffee cart, and went home with two dozen eggs.  He said he'd like to come down once a month to get eggs and he hopes to try some of our homegrown chicken as well.

While hubby and his friend were gaming, I was bartering with the neighbor who raises grass-fed beef cattle for a couple of steaks for hubby to grill today, which is his birthday.  When I asked how much I owed him, he said we could settle that later in the afternoon, as I had mentioned making bread.  The recipe in the new cookbook is for two loaves at a time, and my neighbor says he and his wife LOVE homemade bread, and he returned the half-pint jar that held strawberry syrup (saying it was very good) and I mentioned being up to our armpits in eggs with only nine layers so far (and twenty more due to start laying in the next six weeks).  So, I ended up with two New York strip steaks in exchange for a loaf of honey wheat bread, another half-pint of strawberry syrup, and a dozen eggs.  Oh, and a couple cookies.  He had asked if the cookies were fattening, to which I replied, "Of course!  Non-fattening cookies are as worthless as non-alcoholic beer or decaffeinated coffee."

Now, to start up on the birthday cake, and also start cleaning up to make room for a spare bed because my son is coming down to visit on Monday.

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