Kitchen improvements

Two things:

1. We've built a new cabinet into the largely-unused space over the refrigerator. This will be useful for storing large, not-often used things like canning equipment, crock-pot, etc. We used tongue-and-groove boards, glued together into panels, for the cabinet side and doors.

New cabinet over refrigerator

2. We've modified the base cabinets to the left and right of the sink cabinet, so that now each contains two full-width, full-depth drawers (about 24" x 24"), mounted on full-extension drawer slides. Huge improvement, compared to getting down on hands and knees to find stuff in the back of the old cabinets! We built the drawer fronts of knotty-pine, lightly-stained and varnished.

New drawers make these cabinets more usable

To get to the back, lower section of this cabinet, before drawers,
you had to get down on the floor and do the gator crawl. Much easier now!

How to find stuff in the kitchen

Here is a pictorial guide to the kitchen: where the stuff is hidden, all secrets revealed! These pictures were taken before we installed drawers in place of the door cabinets, but the arrangement of contents is pretty much the same.

Click on read more, below . . .

Bread and butter pickles

Five pounds worth of cukes!

How to make an apple pie

First, you peel 'em:

Apple-peeling gizmo

Then you cut 'em up:

Beth and Georgia

And then you put 'em in a crust:

Happy pie!

There's some other stuff you do (bake it, eat it), but these are the pictures we had.

Photos by Ann

Apples from Tiger Mountain

We came up here after the wedding (end of September, early October), with Ann and Bob and Nancy. We bought a bushel of apples at the Tiger Mountain Orchards packing house, and proceeded to make applesauce.

Apple-picking: Bob, Nancy and Georgia show how it's not done.

U-Pick-Em

Bethel Road, running between Tiger and US-441, south of Clayton, is the local U-Pick-Em mecca. In mid-summer, you can find blackberries and raspberries at several locations, followed later by blueberries and grapes.

From our cottage . . .

Smoking a butt

We smoked a Boston Butt (pork shoulder) yesterday.

Before cooking it, we applied a rub, and let that work overnight, in the refrigerator. Then we let it come to room temperature, and put it on the smoker, at high for about an hour, then medium-low the rest of the time. We used hickory and mesquite wood chips. We let it smoke all day (about nine hours), then let it sit and cool down about an hour. The bone pulled out easily, which means it's done.

Tasty.