We have been known to grill in the winter months around here.  With the deer Jim got he grilled some steaks from the backstrap and they were absolutely delicious.

I wasn't always a fan of deer meat when I was young, maybe it was just the way it was cooked.  I always felt it was tough to eat.  I made a tamale pie with the ground venison and it was so tasty, we are getting a few meals out of it which I love.

I've been finding some really good recipes but the thing is they are all on YouTube, so I have to write them down.  I have this notebook that I've been logging what we've been canning and the amounts.  I thought why not put recipes into this notebook as well. 

I love to hand write my recipes in pencil, just incase I need to change things in any of my entries.  I got this tamale pie recipe from Lori over at Whippoorwill Holler.  It really is the best tamale pie.

We don't have really much snow right now, we got a dusting the other night, but we have definitely had some cold temps, so with cold temps I love to cook.

It's been really busy here around the homestead.  Jim's been working outside doing odds and ends, getting rid of the burn pile that has grown over the year.  It's always good to burn it before it gets too big and the fire ends up being too huge.  Stacking wood by the sugaring area for when it's sugaring time, we definitely don't want to be low on wood when we're boiling sap.

I stayed in and did some prep work for a recipe I wanted to make this week.  I had to go to town to get a couple of the ingredients that I didn't have on hand, one being chili sauce.  Now, I'm a label reader and if it has high fructose corn syrup in it I won't buy it.  Well the two chili sauces that they carried both had it in them...ugh!  I just couldn't pull the trigger to buy either of them.  So, I pulled out my phone and looked up homemade chili sauce and I found a recipe for a maple chili BBQ sauce, okay I could work with that.  When I got home I made the sauce and made another one that is actually chili sauce, and they both are delicious.  Instead of vinegar I used apple cider vinegar.  I just may end up using them both in the recipe I'm making.

A few days ago I started 3 sourdough starts.  I'm actually experimenting with starting them with different flours, all purpose flour, our fresh ground flour and I did two yogurt and buttermilk starts with all purpose and fresh ground, just to see how each of them do.  It looks like a science lab in my kitchen right now :)

Here I am ready to do the first feeding on one of them.  I mixed 1/4 cup all purpose flour and 1/4 cup fresh ground whole wheat flour together and added that with 1/2 cup room temperature water to my sourdough starter, covered it up and put it back to do it's work for another 12 hours, which then I will feed it again.

See the beautiful action that is going on here?  You can also see where the starter had risen at one point then fell back down.

Here are my two yogurt/buttermilk starters, not much action going on with them, they take a bit longer to get going I'm told.

We woke up to 0° here in Southwest Wisconsin this morning, hubby says it's cold out but no breeze of any kind so he says it's quite beautiful out.  I'll just believe him and stay in my nice cozy log home with the fire burning in the wood stove :)

Our canning season is still going strong.  We went to the apple orchard this fall and bought some honey crisp apples.  We usually get the seconds as they are cheaper in price.  I received an email from the orchard we usually go to that they had a BOGO sale going on, which is buy one box, get one box free.  Since it was busy here this fall, but who am I kidding, it's a ALWAYS busy here, but since I was busy I didn't get to the apples right away so we lost a few to rotting.  BUT, I was able to make applesauce out of the remaining good apples.  We really didn't lose that many but it sure seemed like it at the time I was going through them.

This time before I cooked the apples I peeled them.  Oh my goodness, I will always and forever do that when I make applesauce again.  

It was so much easier when I was putting the apples through the sieve, I was not fighting the peelings.

Twenty-four pints of delicious applesauce ready to be put down with all the other canning we did this fall.

I not only canned the applesauce, Jim and I canned more venison stew from the deer he got and the potatoes, onions, and carrots we grew in our garden this year.

Earlier in the fall we canned our peppers and potatoes and made tomato sauce with the tomatoes we picked.  When I say we, I do mean both of us.  I am very fortunate to have a husband who enjoys canning as much as I do.

It really feels good when you do a garden, and come harvest time it's very exciting to preserve the food we've grown.  It's a lot of work but so worth it in the end.

I found this yummy German Apple Pancake over at The Red Feedsack.  Yesterday I made it for breakfast, unfortunately I thought I only had three small apples, because of that there wasn’t much apple filling.  I also didn’t put powdered sugar on it so mine was pretty ugly to look at but we did put our fresh maple syrup on it...YUM!  

It’s much like the Finnish pannukakku I make and Mr seemed to like the German Apple Pancake much better than pannukakku.  I liked them both, tho the German one did fill me up longer than the Finnish one does.  It was a special treat to the end of our sugaring season which was a huge success in both quantity and quality. 

I will confess that I had no idea what an elderberry looked like.  I have heard of elderberries however, but having grown up in the "city" I've not seen elderberries, blueberries and thimbleberries yes, but not elderberries.  Well we found some and have made elderberry syrup and elderberry tincture, both have wonderful health benefits.  We also dried some of the berries for later use.

I get so excited when we find things like this and it appears that not many folks around here use the berries for anything, because now that we are aware of the elderberries, we see the bushes all over along the side of the roads here.

The summer is flying by, some of our grandchildren have gone back to school this week.  It's been a very busy summer here in the Ocooch Mountains.

The wild coneflowers I planted last fall took and are doing great.  We had the Amish butcher our meat birds last week and we spent the day canning and freezing them and then over the weekend Mr. smoked some in the smokehouse he made.

Just incase you forgot what I looked like here I am :)  (Playing around with Snapchat)

I mentioned to Mr. yesterday that I didn't even know what day it was, as a matter of fact I was actually a week behind in my mind and totally forgot that I had to volunteer at the hospital yesterday morning and that's not like me to forget, though I have been known to forget something now and again.

I don't know about any of you but I'm so looking forward to fall coming.

The weather has changed a few times.  No calves born yet, at least not live ones, our neighbor had a calf born too early and it didn't make it, that was sad to hear.  Even though they are not our cattle we see them pretty much everyday and we have gotten kind of attached to them.

Can you believe we are still making syrup?  The sap is still running, slowly but still running.  The 4H group came and had a wonderful time, I'll try and do a post about that.

I've been wanting to make maple sugar since we starting making maple syrup.  So when our son and dil and the grands came we made some.  I thought I'd give the maple sugar a try and looked for a maple cake recipe and Martha Stewart had a maple cake recipe on her blog.

I like a bit of cake with my whip cream :)  Instead of frosting this cake I thought I would put whip cream on it...YUM!

I don't know about you but I'm ready to see some flowers blooming again.

I am here, I am doing fine.  Vee asked if we have been traveling and yes and no.  I've been traveling back and forth a few times to Illinois.  It's just been crazy busy around here.  My cousin had an estate sale that I helped with and was gone from here 5 days.  We had deer hunters come for about 5 days in November, that was fun, but no-one got a deer.  Went on a quilt re-treat over by the Mississippi river.

Did a bit of Christmas baking with my mom's recipe of butter cookies, and my grandmother's recipe of Finnish prune tarts is next on the baking list.

I am so excited to show you our new mailbox post.  Mr got an old walking plow from an older gentleman who wanted it to go to a good home, and since we were needing a new mailbox post after the plow hit it last winter, I wanted something different and Mr came up with this.  It looked pretty with the mailbox swag and the freshly fallen snow that came overnight.

Heading to breakfast at our favorite spot on Sunday mornings and crossing the Wisconsin river.

I've also been busy putting things in a booth that I've rented in a shop in town.  Our daughter and son-in-law from Spokane were here for a few day right before Thanksgiving, then they left and we headed to Illinois for Thanksgiving.

Whew, I think that pretty much sums it up, I know I've probably forgotten a few things that I've done.

Mr and I made applesauce the other day, we made 4 gallons of applesauce.

No sugar was added to the applesauce and it tastes just fine.  Our shelves are really filling up with all the full canning jars.

Huh??!!??!?  Not sure I've heard of it either, that is until I made it.  We had just about a cupful of diced rhubarb in the garden, strawberries leftover from the strawberry shortcake and blueberries in the freezer that were still good but need to be eaten.

I love this strawberry slicer, it's much like the egg slicer that's floating around in most peoples kitchen drawers.

So in the pie they all went, strawberries, rhubarb and blueberries.

I made a butter crust pie crust for the first time and just had to take a quick peek at it while it was baking in the oven.

Out of the oven and waiting for it to cool down some before we had a slice.

A slice of pie with ice cream on it....YUM!!!!!!!

Even tho there was a cup of rhubarb in the pie I added barely a 1/4 cup of sugar to the fruit and with the small scoop of ice cream on top it added just enough sweetness to make it so good.  I'm really finding out that one doesn't need to add all the sugar in recipes to have it sweet enough.  I guess with having cut out sugar 99% in our diet that not having sugar or very little sugar in something doesn't make a difference to us, actually having too much sugar in a recipe we can hardly eat it it's too sweet.  Our taste buds are really changing here.

I'd like to wish all who are celebrating Independence Day a fun and safe celebration.

Happy 4th to you all!!