Homemade Sausage!

Today is the last day of firearm deer season.  It is also the last day of November, and my last thankfulness post.  Honestly, I'm a bit thankful for both!

Deer season is a long haul, trying to squeeze in my normal work hours plus daily household/homesteading chores and still find several hours to sit in the woods and hunt.  It is two straight weeks of running hard and no sleeping in, not on Saturday, not on Sunday.

We could just buy more beef from the grocery store, and skip deer hunting all together.  Would be easier.

But not nearly as interesting, as healthy, or as good tasting.  Not to mention all the cool nature-observing stuff we'd miss out on by not sitting in the woods for 45-105 hours each November.

Plus, if we didn't deer hunt, didn't depend so heavily on deer season to provide us with the majority of the red meat in our diet, we wouldn't now be the happy owners of a sausage stuffer!

Two years ago we started making our own summer sausage.  First, using a boxed seasoning mix (and casings) and the stuffer attachment for a Kitchenaid mixer.  That worked, but not optimally, and took a long, long time.

Last year we tried again with the boxed mix and casings, and the stuffing tube that came with our meat grinder.  A little bit faster, but still time consuming.

Attempting to use it to make hunters' sticks, with casings we bought from our local meat counter (they sell hunters sticks, and were willing to sell us a sleeve of their casings when DH asked) was a big FAIL.  Oh, they tasted great, but we didn't have a small enough stuffer tube to use them with.  Ended up trying to stuff the casings using my cookie press.  2 cups of meat at a time.  Lots of air bubbles from refilling the press frequently, lots of frustration trying to hold the casing tight on the smallest end of the press, lots of grumbling.  More than a little marital strife.

This year, we  skipped the boxed spices and casings, instead purchasing casings in the two sizes we desired, and using my inventory of bulk spices to make our own recipes.  DH also went and bought a real honest to goodness sausage stuffer.

It holds 15 pounds of meat at a time, an entire batch of summer sausage or hunter's sticks.  And it came with small, medium, and large stuffing tubes.  Summer sausage size, bratwurst size, and hunter stick/hot dog size.

It stuffs casings quickly, cleanly, and easily.  No more grumbling, no more marital strife; only happy faces and lots of deer sausage!

batch of hunter sticks, stuffed and ready to cook

The Garden

An early spring picture of the garden, several years ago.  Each year, it begins like this.  And grows into something like this by late June or early July:

And then I get camera happy and take all kinds of picture of vegetables growing in the garden, and DH rolls his eyes because of all the space those pictures take up on the computer.  To be honest, I might just have more pictures of vegetables and flowers and animals than of family members. . . maybe.

I am really thankful for our garden.  Even though it is a lot of work.  It provides us with not just wholesome food, but also exercise (all the weeding!!) and subject matter for practicing my photography skills.

Sunrises

I see a lot of sunrises.  Nearly ever day of the year, I am up early enough to see the sun make it's daily appearance in the eastern sky.

You'd think it would get old after a while.  That once I'd seen a few hundred sunrises, I'd have seen them all.

But it doesn't.  Get old, that is.  Sure, getting up early every morning gets tedious and there are lots of days I'd much rather sleep in.  But the sunrises themselves never get ho-hum.  They are always changing, never the exact same color scheme often enough to get boring.

I'm thankful for all the sunrises I get to witness.

September sunrise at the horse farm

over the field at this little place here

foggy sunrise over the field

crystalline sunrise over the field

sunrise from the deer stand, Nov 15, 2013

November sunrise through the bedroom window

spring sunrise over the marsh

sunrise at the horse farm,

plane jet trails making a cross

another sunrise at the horse farm

Electricity!

It's been a while since I posted, and I'm quite behind on my thankfulness posts for November.

Last week, we were without power for 132 hours.  That is 5.5 days.  Even though we have a generator, not having electric power to the house put quite a crimp in things.  You see, we don't run our generator 'round the clock when the power is out.  And we don't power every single thing in the house with it either.  Plus, there's the daily run to town to fill the gas cans to fuel the generator with. . .

So, once the power was finally restored, there was a lot of chores to catch up on.  Hence my lack of posting.

I am really thankful to have electricity back, and be somewhat back into the groove now.

A New Perch

Well, not really new as in just now installed at this little place here.  New as in, new for me.  This particular 'perch' is a platform DH built about 18 feet up a huge maple tree on our east line back in the woods.  He has taken several nice bucks from it and a handful of does since it came into existence about eight or nine years ago.  But until this past weekend, I had never been up on it myself, had never sat and hunted from it.

Several stars aligned to make this suddenly happen, LOL.  DH had taken his 7-point buck on Friday evening (from the maple platform).  DS2 was home to hunt and would be using his own tree stand on the NW edge of the woods.  A good friend of DH's was staying and hunting with us that weekend, and had a stand hung about 2/3 of the way along the south line.  DD1 wanted to hunt, and she doesn't like being up in trees, which meant she got the apple blind (and therefore the playset was not available for me to hunt from because it is within 20 feet of the apple blind).  My only available option was the double stand, which is so close to the stand on the south line that if the apple blind or playset are also being used at that time, you only have one small area that is safe to shoot at.  Of course, I was not very happy about being stuck with that option.  Plus, Saturday was windy, and the double is close to the field, where most of the wind comes from.

So, DH, all ready having his buck, and being rather low on sleep, offered to stay in from hunting that morning, and give me use of the maple platform.  What an awesome husband!  (Reality:  he was tired, has all ready shot two deer this year and wanted to sleep in more than he wanted to hunt at 6:30 a.m.).

He showed me how to strap myself into the safety harness, explained where on the tree to attach it when I got to the top of the long ladder, and sent me on my way.  Apparently, he was more worried about me falling out of the tree than he let on, because I had barely walked to the far edge of this little place here, climbed the ladder, tethered myself to a branch of the maple, and gotten seated, when I got a text asking if I was securely strapped in yet.  Or, maybe he was just thinking how much more cool hunting stuff he could buy with my life insurance money. . . ;0)

Although the deer were scarce that day, I did enjoy getting the experience of being in the maple tree.  Being loose (except my 4-5' long strap from the top of my harness to the tree limb) on a 2' x 3' platform eighteen feet in the air is a whole different thing than sitting in a tree stand 12-15' above the ground with rails all around you.

looking down from my perch

view to the north

view to the west

I'm thankful I got the opportunity to hunt from the maple platform.  I got to see an aerial view of a part of the woods I had not yet hunted.  I also got to briefly fantasize about myself flying on my tether like a kite, should a big gust of wind knock me off the platform.  Luckily, that didn't happen.  Apparently I weigh enough to not be blown off by a measly 40 mph wind gust!  The thought did keep me entertained while the deer were few and far between (and out of shooting range, way off to the west in the brush).

My New Hunting Hat

With hunting season here again, I was recently reminded of an ongoing problem for the two weeks of late November that make up firearm deer season:  DH can not identify his own orange hat.

Now, this is a problem because it means that there is a chance that when you go to suit up and hit the woods to hunt some deer, your orange hat will not be where you left it.  It will, instead, be on DH's head and he will insist that it is his.  Leaving you with two choices:  insist it is yours and then help DH find where his actually is, or give in and borrow the orange hat of someone who is not hunting that particular day (like, say, DS2 who is not around to hunt currently).  I prefer to use my own hat, for a number of reasons, including the fact that I have a small head compared to the rest of the family (I'm also the shortest, even though I'm 5' 7" tall!) which makes everyone else's hats just a bit loose on me.

Well, this past week I came up with a solution, at least for me.  Everyone else will still have to deal with DH's hat-stealing tendencies.  But for myself, I thought up something that will keep my orange hunting hat safely off DH's head:

I made myself a new one.  One that is small, and 'girly' with many small cables.  It won't fit his head, and it obviously is not his--it has the wrong texture and doesn't look like a hunting hat 'should'.

I got some bright orange yarn (yes, it can be found, I used Encore in worsted weight that is 75% acrylic and 25% wool), follwed a pattern out of the Fall 2013 issue of knitsimple magazine (page 74, #11 cabled hat--leaving off the pompom on the top and the french knots for decoration the magazine showed it in), and knit up my own new hunting hat.

It's not as blaze orange as the fleece gaiter I wear around my neck on cold windy hunting days, but it's close enough to work.  It is actually almost exactly the same shade as DH's hunting hat, which I think goes to show that there are variations of blaze orange.

Anyway, it works (keeps my head warm and prevents it getting shot off), and DH can definitely tell it is not his.  For this, I am thankful.  Mission accomplished.

Glad to Have a Generator

I am thankful that last winter, DH finally bought a generator.  It was something we looked at purchasing when we built the house at this little place here in 2002/2003, but, well, construction always runs over budget (especially when the institution giving you the construction loan comes back 30% of the way into the project and cuts your funding 10%. . . and again when you are half completed, and again. . .) and so a generator got shelved to the 'someday when we can afford it' list.

Anyway, we didn't buy a generator until this past winter, when the power went out during a below-zero spell and the electric company said it would be three days before they got to us.  That was the straw that broke the camel's back, as it were, and DH went out and purchased a generator so that we could at least keep the heat on enough to prevent the plumbing from freezing.

Currently, we are running on generator power again.  A big storm blew through on Sunday afternoon, and our electricity went out about 4:30 p.m.  This time of year, when temperatures are a little more moderate than they were when DH bought the generator, we don't worry so much about the power going out because the pipes aren't going to freeze, and it is cool enough that our garage can be used as a giant refrigerator.  The chest freezer is full enough that it will maintain itself for about two days as long as no one opens it.  So we didn't fire up the generator right away; we lit the oil lamps, cooked dinner on the stove top (which is gas), and went to bed an hour or so earlier than we would have otherwise.

But the next morning, the electric company still did not have an estimated restoration time for our electricity.  Knowing how big of a storm it was, and that there are 100s of thousands of people in the lower part of Michigan without power because of that storm, DH pulled the generator out, filled it with gas, and fired it up.

Now, when we run on our generator, we are still roughing it a bit.  Because it is not one of those huge, expensive ones that can run a whole house like nothing is wrong at all.  No, it is smaller, and so we pick and choose what is on while the generator is running.  We can run the blower on the wood boiler (thus having heat in the house), the main fridge, and the chest freezer at one time.  But no lights, and not the well pump for water.  So, we cycle back and forth, getting the fridge and freezer cooled down to optimum temp again before cutting one or both of those, and turning the well pump on long enough to refill the pressure tank (from which we can get a limited supply of water without power).  Or, we run one room of lights and outlets so cell phones and computers can be recharged for work and school the next day.  Then, when we go to bed, the generator is again shut off, to save gas (and $$$), since while we are sleeping we won't be opening the fridge, or notice if the house cools off 10 degrees since there is also no heat.  But we don't use the oven, or anything else that draws a lot of current, and we don't get to shower much.  Last night DH shut off everything except the bathroom lights and the well pump and we each got to take a very quick shower--oh, that felt so good!

Now, nearly 65 hours after the power went out, and the electric company saying it might be Friday afternoon before it comes back on, I am really, really thankful that we have a generator.