Wedding Preparations - Pumpkins and Mums!

Holy Moly I've never seen so many mums and pumpkins in my life! Everything has been a whorlwind for the past few weeks but the end is in sight! This saturday all the wedding stuff will be over and life can return to normal. For the time being there are mums and pumpkins all over the yard.

 

Boomer loves the mums but he keeps trying to eat the flowers!

 

Perhaps one of the greatest things about an October wedding is the abundance of natural decorations available. And you can't beat the prices! We were able to get a deal with a local pick-your-own pumpkin patch so that we paid one price to fill the trunk of a car with as many pumpkins as we could. Not too bad at all! There are so many colors, shapes, and sizes of pumpkins that just about anyone could find pumpkins to match their colors. As long as the deer leave these ones alone they should be just fine for the big day this weekend :)



I LOVE white pumpkins

We got all the mums for a great price by buying them form the local school soccer team's fundraiser. We've been trying to keep them alive for a few weeks but they seem like they will mostly all make it. We got 25 large plants and then another 30 of the smaller rusty-gold colored ones to use in the centerpieces.



These are only some of them! those yellow ones...they might not make it...

Things are certainly starting to get real as the days get closer! There's still so much to do! It's hard to fit in time for anything else by the time I get home from work and play with the dog and make supper for us! Hopefully life will calm back down to normal soon and we can get our new chicken coop/complex finished before the snaw starts to fall.


Cheers!

Creamy Chicken & Wild Rice Soup

One of my favorite things to cook (and eat!) are creamy, hearty soups. The weather is barely getting colder, but I'm already gearing up to make soups. My fiance Matt and I chose to have a soup bar at our wedding coming up in October and since I'm doing all the food for the event myself I've been busy making up big batches of soup and freezing them for the big day.

Today with the help of my mom I'm making up 6 batches of this creamy goodness so the amounts in the pictures might look a little big. Just follow the instructions below though and you will have your own pot of soup to warm your soul up with on a chilly day!

This soup has great flavor but it's sort of a cheater soup because the secret is a boxed rice mix. With all the rice pilaf and cheddar broccoli rice there is a Long Grain Wild Rice box that has a seasoning pack in it. That is what I use to make this soup, but I'm sure that same mix could be easily recreated. (Future blog post alert!)

The first step is to slice up all some carrots, celery, and onion. I use about 3 carrots, 2 sticks of celery and half to a whole sweet onion.

Pour around 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large pot and then add the veggies you just sliced, about  teaspoon of dried marjoram, and the seasoning packet from the rice. Saute for five minutes then add the rice and 2 tablespoons or flour.

Mix that all up then pour in 7 cups of chicken broth. I use homemade stock or bone broth, but you can use canned broth or even 7 cups of water and 7 chicken bouillon cubes. Bring this mix to a boil and let er rip for a good 15 or 20 minutes.

While the rest of the soup is boiling heat up 1 full cup of heavy cream. Heating it up before adding it to the boiling soup helps the two combine better and also avoids causing the cream to get all weird. We don't like weird cream in our soups in these parts.

One heated/warmed, add said cream to the big pot and also add one cup of cut up cooked chicken (or more if your family is anything like mine and loves meat). Mix this all together and let the whole pot simmer for 30 minutes. Stir occasionally to prevent the soup from catching and to encourage the flavors to meld together. Add salt and pepper to your liking. YUM!

I recommend serving this soup with some fresh baked bread, but you can eat it however you like! It should be thick and creamy and herby-green in color thanks to the marjoram.

Creamy Chicken & Wild Rice Soup

• 3 sliced carrots
• 2 sliced celery sticks
• 1 small sliced sweet onion
• 2 tb olive oil
• 1 box of Long grain wild rice (with seasoning)
• 1 tsp dried marjoram
• 2 tb flour
• 7 cups chicken broth
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 cup cooked chicken meat
• salt and pepper

1.  Heat oil in large pot then add vegetables and spices, saute for 5 minutes
2. Add rice and flour and stir, then add broth, boil 15 minutes
3. Heat up cream then add to soup
4. Add cooked chicken, stir, simmer for 30 minutes
5. Add salt and pepper to taste

Fall might finally be getting here!

 

After spending a little time outside today I think fall may have finally arrived! While the sun is shining and everything is still bright and warm, there is that beautiful fall breeze rustling through the trees. The leaves around our home are just beginning to turn color and some have already begun to drop to the lawn. This is our pup, Boomer's, first fall and he is loving chasing the leaves around and pouncing on acorns!

 

 

The turning leaves and colder nights are a beautiful thing, but they are also a reminder that winter is coming and that we need to get more firewood rounded up, split and stacked. We also need to order some more heating oil as we cannot heat out home with the fireplace alone. :(

We're down to only 7 chickens at this point with the Cornish-rocks now in the freezer with the beef cow but maybe that's not such a bad thing as we head into winter. The Silver Laced Wyandotte pullets should be laying by the end of October and I can't wait to see their little brown eggs (hopefully in the nest boxes where they belong!) More updates to come on that later!

I recently ripped out some of my summer vegetables and re-tilled the soil before placing rows of carrot and beet seeds into the ground. The tender seedlings are poking up through the soil and ready to produce round two of our beets and carrots for this year's growing season. The green beans have slowed down dramatically and we've decided to try and save some seeds for next year so we will be letting the remaining pods grow and big and lumpy. We will then dry them and take out the seeds and cross our fingers that next spring we can buy at least one less seed pack!

First Blog Post - Welcome!

Hey There!

If you've landed here then wlecome to the blog! This is a place where I will talk about animals, cooking, farming, DIY, forestry, trying to buy a house/farm, and all sorts of things!

In the following posts you can expect to see recipies, diy projects, pictures and stories about animals, and lot's of things going on at our little homestead!

I'm so glad you're here!