Potatoes with Bacon and Cheese Sauce

 All recipes in this blog are my own.

This is one of my favorite recipes :)
Please note that I never measure anything at all, so the amounts are not exact but should be pretty close.

What you need:

- 3 large potatoes
- 1 standard package of bacon
- a big head of broccoli
- butter (about 1/4 of a stick)
- flour (about 2 tbsp)
- salt 1/4 tsp (optional)
- pepper 1/4 tsp
- nutmeg 1/4 tsp (optional)
- 1 cup of milk
- mustard 1 tbsp
- 1 1/2 cups of grated cheese 

It takes me about 40 minutes to put this together, and I'll give you the sequence of actions. This feeds 4 people and it's well worth the time.

- Peel and wash the potatoes, and cut them in thick slices, each slice being a half to 3/4 inch thick.
- Boil the potatoes.
- While the potatoes are boiling, wash the broccoli, cut it up and boil it.
- Cut the bacon into thin pieces and fry it.
- Turn the oven on warm, just warm.

- When the potatoes are ready, drain them and put them in a large baking dish. Keep them warm in the oven.
- Drain the broccoli but keep the water you used to boil it.
- Add the broccoli to the potatoes in the oven.
- Drain the grease off the fried bacon. I keep the grease and freeze it to be used for popcorn making some other time.
- Add the bacon to the mix in the oven, dividing everything evenly across the baking dish.

OK now you just need to make a cheese sauce and that's it.

- Put the butter in a pan and melt it.
- Add the flour to make a roux
- Add salt, pepper, nutmeg and mustard. 
- Add milk and keep stirring. It should be pretty thick. 
- Add some of the water in which you boiled the broccoli, add a little at a time until you have a smooth looking sauce.
- Add the grated cheese, stir one more time and pour the sauce over the contents of the dish in the oven.
- If you want to be fancy, you can also put some grated cheese over the top of it all and put it under the broiler until brown.

Serve and enjoy.

Growing Giant Peruvian Corn

 We grew giant Peruvian corn for 5 years in a row until this past growing season we decided to stop growing it.
Keep reading to find out about the great, the good, the bad, and the ugly about growing giant Peruvian corn.

The giant Peruvian corn stalk easily grow up to 20 to 24 feet which is 6.09 to 7.31 meters. They grow super quickly too. The stalks become so thick they almost look like small trees and the good thing is that the stalks can be used the next season to make trellises for beans and whatnot as long as they are kept in a dry spot in wintertime.

Here are some pictures of the corn:

Impressive for sure. Visitors loved it and we always got a lot of oohs and aahs but you know what we didn't get? Corn! That's right, we never had any corn to speak of except last year, but it wasn't pretty. The ears would grow big and thick. They too were impressive, but something always went wrong. Critters and birds got away with them and they didn't want to share with us, or the season wasn't long enough for the ears to mature, you name it, it happened. 

The corn would sometimes fall over in a storm. Due to the huge stalks, they caught a good amount of wind. A decent storm would knock them over.
This past year I had started the corn inside the greenhouse. As they say, by the 4th of July the corn should be knee high. Mine was well above my head by the 4th of July. So here we thought we would eat some giant Peruvian corn at last, and we did. It was tough, bland, and chewy, we had left it on the stalks for too long but who knew. These ears took longer to mature than regular corn, and we were inexperienced. This is when we decided to stop growing this kind of corn. For stalks to get this tall, it takes a lot of nutrients out of the soil.

I miss seeing those giants but it's for the better.

Meet the Sheep

 Let me explain how we ended up with sheep. We had 8 chickens, they gave us many eggs and even friendship. Once they became too old to produce eggs the coop turned into a chicken nursing home. We let them live out their lives but then came the dreaded moment when we were down to one chicken. Her name was Annie and she was such a lovely creature.

Here is a picture of Annie:

To prevent Annie from getting lonely, we borrowed a lamb from a friend.

Here is said lamb, we named her Laika:

Wouldn't you know it, Annie was terrified of Laika. Indeed, we were rather inexperienced with all this. our friend could not take Laika back right away, so we kept her in our little homestead for a few weeks.

Then came the day that she went back home. I came with her to drop her off. As I turned around and walked back to my car, Laika started to cry so badly, it was heartbreaking. She pressed her head against my leg, looked up at me and just cried and cried. The rest is history.

I quickly built a sheep stall inside our shed, Laika came home and we thought that she would live happily ever after. Little did we know that you can't have just one sheep. Laika got lonely. We spent every free minute with her, took her for walks, played with her, etc.. But the second we were out of her sight, she'd cry. Long story short, we got her some company.

Meet Laika and Betty, both very much grown at this time. They've been together for four years now.

Stuffed Peppers Recipe

 All recipes in this blog are my own.

Stuffed Peppers.

What you need:

2 peppers
1 pound chopped meat.
1 large onion
1 small can of tomato paste
1/4 tsp nutmeg
1/4 tsp pepper
a cup of breadcrumbs
2 tbsp mustard
2 tbsp parsley flakes or dried spinach flakes.

Preparation:

Cut the peppers in half length-wise and remove the seeds and the white stuff.
Mix all the ingredients together (except the peppers of course)
Stuff the peppers with the mixture. There will be some left. The leftover can be shaped like a little meatloaf and can go in the pan with the stuffed peppers.
Put everything in a baking dish. I usually like the dish with parchment paper since I don't use oil when I can avoid it.
Cover with aluminum foil.
Bake in the over at 375 degrees for about a half hour.
Remove the aluminum foil after a half hour and bake for another half hour or until ready, it could be less than an hour total, just keep an eye on it.

Note:

The amounts as well as cooking times are approximate since I never set a timer and I never measure anything, so use your judgement.

Strawberry secrets

 Well, this was my first experience with growing strawberries.

I purchased 10 small strawberry plants last year. Great was my excitement when I found a handful of strawberries on the plants. I saved the runners and planted them in little pots in September. Runners are vine-like extensions that shoot out of the plants and grow some leaves as well as some roots.

Once the runners were well established in the pots, it was time to plant them outdoors.

I made a hill of about a foot tall and planted the runners about 12 to 15 inches apart. Once planted, I covered the entire hill with hay, and this has definitely kept the weeds down.

I also planted some runners inside a stack of two tires plus I made a raised bed out of Styrofoam boxes. At that point, the runners had gotten pretty big.

This is what it looked like:

After my strawberry beds had been set up, fall and winter came and the gardens took a long, cold nap. Would the strawberry plants survive the bitter cold? Would the snow flatten them?
Once spring came and the snow melted away, I was happy to see the strawberry plants come to life.
Fast-forward a few months, and June has been beyond generous. With still numerous strawberries to pick, I have already frozen 10 quarts.

The strawberries are big and oh so sweet.

Four quarts in the sink, just from today's harvest.

I didn't even use half of the runners. I am convinced that you can start a strawberry farm with just 10 plants. If I saved all the runners from this year, I'd literally have hundreds of plants.

Snake Rescue.

 We rescued a snake today. The poor thing was stuck on some ductape and she was stuck with 3 different parts of her body, the front, the middle, and the end. Things looked hopeless there for a bit but it all worked out in the end.

She was stuck on a bag in the old chicken coop which we now use as a hay storage shed. I saw her right away when I opened the door, but it took me a few minutes to realize that she was stuck on the ductape and couldn't move. I took the bag outside because it was super hot in the old coop.

If you look carefully, you will see the snake stretched out across the tape. It quickly became clear that the tape was far too strong to simply pull her off, so we resorted to the next best and maybe only option, Mark cut the tape from around her and simply left pieces of tape on her body.

Rescue operation almost finished..

While I was holding a piece of the tape she was stuck on, she 'musked'. I actually thought she pooped since I had never heard of snake musk. The smell was awful and very strong. Turns out that snakes use this musk to keep predators at bay.

Miss snake was very lucky that she was found because I usually only go in the old coop maybe once every other week. This could have ended very badly for the snake but thankfully, this story had a happy ending.

Saving on the Grocery Bill

 It's a fact, we have to eat if we want to stay alive. Especially in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic, groceries aren't cheap by any means, plus we are dealing with the 'shrinkflation'.

Let's see how we can make the grocery bill a bit lighter. Here are a number of suggestions that will help us do just that.

- Never go shopping when you're hungry. When shopping while hungry, we are tempted to buy a whole lot more. It's a fact and I'm sure we've all done it. Eating a full meal just before a shopping trip will keep the excess snacks out of the cart.

- Use a grocery list and stick to it. Using a list has more than one advantage. You also don't risk forgetting anything and having to go back. Simply put it on the list when you run low on something. The fridge door is a good place to hang the list. Once you enter the store, armed with your list, stick to what is on the list. If it's not on there, you most likely don't need it. I'd make an exception for items that are on sale though. See later in this article.

- Limit grocery shopping to once a week at the very most. Here is why: The more often you go grocery shopping, the more you will end up buying. I'll give you an example. I love a good avocado and I'll buy one every time I go shopping. If I go shopping once a week, I will have bought 4 of them in a month but should I go grocery shopping twice a week, I'd be buying 8 of them and spending twice as much. We all have a fridge and a freezer, no doubt. So I find that shopping even once a week is a lot. Less is better here.

- Take advantage of items on sale. If you see something that's on sale, go for it, even if it's not on your list. This is an exception to the 'stick to your list' rule. However, do not be tempted. Only buy things on sale that you normally would buy and eat anyway. Don't buy something just because it's on sale. Also, check the expiration dates. Sometimes things might go on sale when they are about to go out of date.

- Make use of coupons. Many stores offer coupons. Make use of them. Just yesterday I bought a gallon of water for .99 cents, it is normally $1.24 at that particular store. 
Some stores offer BOGO (Buy One Get One Free). Make use of it when it's something you normally buy and use.

- Always go to the same store(s). If you always go to the same stores for your grocery shopping, you will know where everything is. If you go to a store that you're not familiar with, you will have to search for items you need, and you're bound to find and purchase a few things that you could have lived without.

- Buy in bulk where possible. Buying a large quantity is usually cheaper.
However, make very sure to compare the prices because I've actually seen situations where the bulk packaging was actually more expensive than the non-bulk version, so always compare the prices.

- Don't forget your reusable bags. I don't know if all states no longer give free plastic grocery bags or how it works in other countries but here in New York State the grocery stores are no longer allowed to give out those flimsy plastic grocery bags. The shopper has to bring the bags or buy reusable bags. Make sure you always bring your own bags, or you might be tempted to buy some.

Thanks for reading and if you have more tips to save on grocery shopping feel free to leave them in a comment and I'll add them :)