Jerky

Matthew shot his first deer with his bow on Monday. Happy dance! The day he's long been working and waiting for. It was a small doe. He and Melvin decided they would turn it into jerky.

The internet is a very helpful place. These boys listened to the instructions of this person and that and figured out how to make jerky.

There were marinade recipes online that they tried and one in the Kanagy Kitchen Classics. Thank you, Freda. They liked yours the best.

A few hours in the oven turned the meat into dried goodness. These giants devoured most of it in the same day! (Truth to tell, Yours Truly was gone shopping all day and what else did they have to eat?)

Are you as favorably impressed with my sons' abilities as I am? 

Today I am thankful for... 

...motivated, Christian sons.

...plenty of food. (Wouldn't you be too if you had five sons?)

...shelter from the cold rain.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Do you ever feel like that's all your life consists of? Well, come to think of it, it might just be exactly that. This post will describe "A Day in the Life of the Lapps".

When my alarm went at 6 AM, it seemed like a nightmare. Yesterday was a wearing day, being with the ladies at the Sisters' Sewing and then with challenging teens at Kid's Club. You have to be on your guard in both places, keeping watch over your heart and tongue by the grace of God.

The boys joined me in the kitchen to make breakfast and pack lunches. We made a kettle of vegetable soup (I like the seasonings in this recipe) so there was something to pack. Sometimes sandwiches would be such a handy fix... But those take time too. And more expensive ingredients. And they take their toll on your gut.

After making scrambled eggs and gluten free "muffins" (I just bake them as globs on a cookie sheet for convenience) for breakfast, and the soup for lunch, I started a canner full of tomato sauce. We ate our breakfast and had family prayer and then the men were off to work.

Some breakfast mess left on the table. Pie pans and covers for the lemon meringue pies, a wallet, receipts, a battery charger and sanding disks. I did say we cover surfaces, right?

Stephen is working on a log house, getting it ready to stain while Thomas, Austin and Matthew are working on staining a large deck. Matthew says the only thing he's done on the job in the last couple years is "run a paint brush". It's true. They do a lot of painting and staining.

And a correction on a post some days ago (Disappointment). The paint sprayer wasn't what had broken down. It was a backpack sprayer. Pretty big difference there.

I worked on blending some more tomatoes for sauce. My method is to boil them down until they are quite thick and then blend them. Any necessary seasonings will be added when I use the sauce.

Tomatoes in the bowl in the back, vegetable peelings in the front bowl, sauce in jars, plus....

Dirty milk jars, small jar of milk left from a packed lunch and lids for more jars, plus...

Next we settled into our studies. We read the story of Sarai giving Abram her servant Hagar for a wife, Hagar's encounter with an angel and Ishmael's birth. Genesis 16

My spot. Reading, writing. The ladder makes an excellent shelf. Surfaces again....

We started the next Little House book- on the Prairie. The family leaves the little house in the big woods, all lonely with its shutters tightly shut so that it can't see them going. They cross the Mississippi the day before the ice breaks up and travel on toward "Indian Country". We left them in their monotonous journey across the plains of Kansas.

During our reading time some friends came to pick green beans so we had to tend to a few logistics there. They would need canning jars so we dug a pile of boxes of jars out of the shed. 

They'd already taken several boxes by the time I got a photo..

We also dug out a bed frame I've been wanting to sell as part of a bedroom suite. Some things get so buried behind equipment that you've got to grab them while there's an opportunity.

You can see in these photos that my
aloes desperately need re-potting.

Lunch behind us, I took a good nap. I was so tired I could hardly function. I got a new lease on life and tackled the kitchen. Before and after photos...

(A)

(B)

(C)

(D)

(E)

(F)

The first four pictures were taken a few hours before the last two. You can see that things just kind of shift rather than ever getting totally cleared and cleaned. 

The towel on the counter top (A & F) was emptied of canned applesauce and then refilled with tomato sauce.

The empty sink (E) soon refills with dirty dishes in the process of making the next meal and men coming home from work.

The counter top (F) refills with thawing meat to put through the grinder, the empty canner, and etc.

The bar (F [green]) is cleaned! One surface that is completely clean helps the mood. Especially if you burn a candle there.

The tomatoes that I cooked yesterday need to be recooked so they don't spoil before I can finish making soup. The stove top stays so busy I don't have time to clean it.

A friend called to say he has a deer for us so the boys are studying videos to figure out the process of gutting and skinning a deer.

Stephen is gone "shooting" his uncle's truck. His "weapon" is his camera. Thomas is in a meeting. 

Austin and Matthew gutted the deer. Matthew was rather disgusted that it took them an hour. "We've watched enough videos on how to do it. It shouldn't have taken us that long!" 

I say, "It's your first time. Seeing and doing are two different things. Give yourself a break."

So there you have it. The imperfect family.

Did you ever hear the song Tattler's Wagon? I was thinking of a phrase in there that says "As fast as I could empty it, some friend would fill it full". In relation to the surfaces in my house. Ha ha.

Some day they'll all have flown the nest and then I'll wish for some cluttered surfaces. Maybe.

How do you control surface clutter?