Beautiful – but Painful
The ice storm continued all day yesterday, we lost power for a few hours in the afternoon but it came back on. I still have a “lights out” blog post scheduled for tomorrow in case they go out again and I can’t get on-line. Ice storms are beautiful, but they’re a mess. We have enough ice that trees are dropping branches left and right. When you go outside the sound of branches and trees coming down is constant. Lucky for us, there aren’t any trees close enough to drop branches on the house. The chicken coop barely escaped a big white pine branch.
It should be interesting to get out a little today to see how much damage has been done. We won’t be able to go into the wood until all the ice melts and we’re hoping our driveway melts soon.
Anyone else dealing with ice and power outages from this storm?
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It Snowed….
We’ve had a good deal of snow this week, Mr Chiots and I are happy. We love winter and we LOVE the snow. The snow makes everything lighter and brighter, it inspires me to grab my camera and head outside, inspiration to take pictures has been lacking around here lately. Here are some lovely images from our sunny snowy afternoon yesterday.
Over the past week we’ve received 16″-18″ of snow! Of course the snow brings with it much work, but it’s work we’re thankful for. Sometimes in the winter you need a little extra motivation to get outside and get moving. Plowing and shoveling are good for the body.
What inspires you to get outside this time of year?
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Smoke ‘Em if You’ve Got ‘Em
Yesterday, Mr Chiots finally rolled the new smoker out of the garage. It’s quite a beauty, looks like an outhouse, but that’s OK, maybe that will keep people from stealing our bacon. After setting it in place, we immediately built a fire, attached the tube from the old grill left by the previous owners and it was filled with smoke. Into it went all the bacons, a few petite picnic hams, jowl bacon, Canadian bacon and the ham hocks.
We’ve been wanting to build a smoker for a LONG time, but we never really had much to smoke, that’s not the case any more! Yesterday we put about 100 lbs of meat in there and started using trimmings from our apple tree to give it a sweet smoky flavor.
In the future I’m definitely going to try smoking peppers, cheeses and other goodies. This should be a fun thing to experiment with. Perhaps I’ll even try to make my own smoked sea salt and peppercorns.
Do you enjoy smoked, meats, cheese, peppers or spices?
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Craziness
There are power lines down the hill from our house, they actually cut across the very front corner of our property. We can’t see the lines because we’re up a hill and about a third of a mile away. You don’t even notice they are there, until they start doing work. The local power company is adding new lines, so there have been loads of trucks, lots of noise and recently, lots of helicopters! It’s been fascinating to watch. Every now and then, when I’m washing dishes, I’ll see a helicopter come up over the trees carrying a few guys dangling from a long rope.
One day I went down to grab a few photos. What a job and what a commute.
Anything crazy going on around your neighborhood this week?
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Friday Favorite: Beets
I love beets, especially when they’re pickled. It’s a good thing, because I have a ton of them in the back garden. This row of beets is 3 beets wide and about 60 feet long. That’s a lot of beets. I’ve been thinning them out for the past month or two, we’ve been roasting them. A few of them have also gone to the pigs, who greedily chomp them down making themselves look like they committed a heinous crime. In fact, one day, I went up to water them after feeding them beets and I thought one was injured and bloody, it was just beet juice.
Not all of them will be pickled, some will be stored in the root cellar for eating, others will be stored for growing leaves for our table during the dark days of February. The weather is turning colder, while beets will last a while in the garden after the frost comes, they won’t live forever. These coming weeks will involve lots of pink fingers!
Do you like pickled beets?
