What did you do in the garden today?

[WthrLady]

We live about a mile down the road from a DNR hunting area, so hearing gun shots is pretty common around here. Even when it's not hunting season, you often hear people doing target practice year round. Growing up in the city but now living in the country, I've come away with the perspective that generally speaking, if you hear gunshots in the country it's probably someone honing their shooting skills, but if you hear gunshots in the city someone has probably been shot!

Our back fence butts up to the state park and hunting is allowed all around us. Hear gunshots on any day of the year up here. Heck. DH goes out and shoot the night's mouse catch at 5am every morning.

 

[WthrLady]

I have the office put back together. DH needs to spend time purging crap and get stuff back on the shelves. It's not allowed to be a pig sty dumping ground anymore! That's one of the things that drove me bonkers about it. It wasn't usable. AND therefor he just made piles and piles and piles. If you aren't going to put it away, it obviously isn't important, so throw it away! ARGH.

He has to give me an hour a night of donate, keep, sell, or trash until he's done. And it all has to be done before DS comes home Tuesday night. Then I can get things back on the walls.

THEN I'll start demolishing the office bathroom and get that remodeled.

 

[pennyJo1960]

Started with a great plan to do sourdough English muffins all went great till I poured the dough on the counter getting quite bit more flour in then went drat did not put 1 cup of cornmeal needed with the flour so here is 3 loaves of sourdough for the house

 

[Acre4Me]

The grass seed we planted on bare dirt has grown pretty well. Better coverage than I was expecting, so the light rain most of the day has been good.

Not too productive today. Woke up with a major kink in my neck! Have no idea what I did while I slept, but now after all day of pain killers (ibuprofen, Tylenol) it’s only hurting about half as much. Hopefully better tomorrow!

 

[pennyJo1960]

The grass seed we planted on bare dirt has grown pretty well. Better coverage than I was expecting, so the light rain most of the day has been good.

Not too productive today. Woke up with a major kink in my neck! Have no idea what I did while I slept, but now after all day of pain killers (ibuprofen, Tylenol) it’s only hurting about half as much. Hopefully better tomorrow!

if you have someone that will work on your neck there they need to find the spot that is hurts the worst if they wiggle their finger in it you will feel the release as a very cool sensation

 

[karenerwin]

Started with a great plan to do sourdough English muffins all went great till I poured the dough on the counter getting quite bit more flour in then went drat did not put 1 cup of cornmeal needed with the flour so here is 3 loaves of sourdough for the house View attachment 1964261

I'm impressed that you can even make English muffins! The only ones I have ever had came from a restaurant or the grocery store! I'm sure they will gobble up the sourdough bread anyways!
I bought a friend a couple of boxes of pumpkin spice instant oatmeal. She loves PUMPKIN flavor and they were marked down at the store. I texted her to see if she had ever tried it and she said," Yes! You gave me some last year. Yummy!" LOL, I don't remember getting it for her last year, but I believe her. I'm always buying lost of pumpkin flavored stuff for her when I see it. They had 11 boxes of it marked down, but I only bought her 2. When we dropped it off at her house she asked me if I wanted the 3 pumpkins on the porch. I said yes. When I went to pick them up they were barely holding together.
Good thing we had some plastic bags in the car. I tossed those straight into the garden when we got home. I'll go out tomorrow or the next day and try to scoop up as many of their seeds as I can. I didn't want to put them in the compost bin because her kids had painted them and I don't want the chickens to eat paint!
Cleaned out, defrosted, organized the deep freezer. I made a list of what all is in there. 21 pounds of ground venison ( so far) plus 3 more bags waiting to be ground up. 13 packages of assorted venison ( we are going to meet my son about halfway tomorrow to give him the 13 packages of venison. I'm keeping all the ground venison).
There was a lot of other stuff in there as well. My list took 2 pages of notebook paper. Hopefully, we will remember to cross stuff off as we use it and not keep buying stuff we already have.
Saturday we have to butcher one of our Tom turkeys for Thanksgiving. Not looking forward to that chore. They are both such good looking Toms and both are very nice.
But we don't need 2 Toms and my niece and the rest of the relatives love it when we donate a fresh home raised turkey for Thanksgiving. We butcher it and drop it off to my niece and she cooks it and has everybody over for Thanksgiving.

I also have 4 packages of meat ( big pack of porksteaks, a flank steak, some breakfast steaks and some chuck tenders that were starting to get freezer burned so I moved them to the refrigerator and will have to cook them in the next day or so.

 

[pennyJo1960]

This is the recipe took the photo of the ring I use to cut them cranberry if you can cut them frozen they work best
PJ’s English Muffins

Ingredients

1 cup milk warmed to the touch
2 tablespoons white sugar
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1 or 2 cup if sourdough not used cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1 cup sourdough
1/4 cup melted shortening
6 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
6 tbsp cornmeal additional

Directions

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. Mix in the sugar, stirring until dissolved. Let cool until lukewarm. In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the milk, yeast mixture, shortening and 3 cups flour. Beat until smooth. Add salt and rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. Knead in Place
Punch down. Roll out to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut rounds with biscuit cutter, drinking glass, or empty tuna can. Sprinkle waxed paper with cornmeal and set the rounds on this to rise. Dust tops of muffins with cornmeal also. Cover and let rise 1/2 hour.

Brown on skillet medium heat then Bake for 5 minutes. Oven temperature to 350°F and bake for an addition 10-15 minutes or until muffins springs back when touched in the center.

Remove the muffins from the pan immediately; place muffins on a wire rack to cool completely.

 

[karenerwin]

This is the recipe took the photo of the ring I use to cut them cranberry if you can cut them frozen they work best
PJ’s English Muffins

Ingredients

1 cup milk warmed to the touch
2 tablespoons white sugar
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1 or 2 cup if sourdough not used cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1 cup sourdough
1/4 cup melted shortening
6 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
6 tbsp cornmeal additional

Directions

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. Mix in the sugar, stirring until dissolved. Let cool until lukewarm. In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the milk, yeast mixture, shortening and 3 cups flour. Beat until smooth. Add salt and rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. Knead in Place
Punch down. Roll out to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut rounds with biscuit cutter, drinking glass, or empty tuna can. Sprinkle waxed paper with cornmeal and set the rounds on this to rise. Dust tops of muffins with cornmeal also. Cover and let rise 1/2 hour.

Brown on skillet medium heat then Bake for 5 minutes. Oven temperature to 350°F and bake for an addition 10-15 minutes or until muffins springs back when touched in the center.

Remove the muffins from the pan immediately; place muffins on a wire rack to cool completely.View attachment 1964418

Thanks, Penny! I will definitely try this.

 

[Acre4Me]

This is the recipe took the photo of the ring I use to cut them cranberry if you can cut them frozen they work best
PJ’s English Muffins

Ingredients

1 cup milk warmed to the touch
2 tablespoons white sugar
1 (.25 ounce) package active dry yeast
1 or 2 cup if sourdough not used cup warm water (110 degrees F/45 degrees C)
1 cup sourdough
1/4 cup melted shortening
6 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup cornmeal
1 teaspoon salt
6 tbsp cornmeal additional

Directions

Warm the milk in a small saucepan until it bubbles, then remove from heat. Mix in the sugar, stirring until dissolved. Let cool until lukewarm. In a small bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Let stand until creamy, about 10 minutes.

In a large bowl, combine the milk, yeast mixture, shortening and 3 cups flour. Beat until smooth. Add salt and rest of flour, or enough to make a soft dough. Knead in Place
Punch down. Roll out to about 1/2 inch thick. Cut rounds with biscuit cutter, drinking glass, or empty tuna can. Sprinkle waxed paper with cornmeal and set the rounds on this to rise. Dust tops of muffins with cornmeal also. Cover and let rise 1/2 hour.

Brown on skillet medium heat then Bake for 5 minutes. Oven temperature to 350°F and bake for an addition 10-15 minutes or until muffins springs back when touched in the center.

Remove the muffins from the pan immediately; place muffins on a wire rack to cool completely.View attachment 1964418

I’ve made a successful batch of EM before (years ago), and tried again recently -another recipe that was a total failure. Your recipe looks similar to the one that worked. Question on the rise: I see your recipe says knead then punch down, but usually there is a rise step before punch down. So, is there a rise in the bowl, punch down, then cut out rounds, and rise again? Or is it only one rise after they are cut out?

 

[Acre4Me]

My boys are crowing at 6:20am. So far, they seem to not crow until about 6am although we have light in the coop earlier than that. Of course, it could be the neighbors rooster, who is the brother and same breed of our younger boy, so they sound similar. Our main rooster (20 months old) is molting a big molt and looks pretty raggedy, so he’s been a little less feisty lately and I haven’t heard him crow so early.

My neck is 80% better today! Hooray!

Today it’s research on sewing machines. I’ve had two older machines, bought used many years ago, that are very basic machines as they are late 60’s/early 70s models, and perform the basic 2 stitches ok, and met the very occasional needs I had. One has an external drive belt, and they are both quite heavy. They both need maintenance work as one in particular is having issues that I can’t address. But, with only one young teen left at home, I’ve got some more time to delve into projects, and a machine with more functionality will come in handy! But wow! Many choices and features and price points! So, still researching.