Something Fishy around here....

Those of you that have been reading my blog very long know that we eat wild game, and steer away from other types of meat. This limits us to 2 primary sources of meat 1) deer (venison) and 2) fish. We also are lucky sometimes to get shrimp, wild rabbit, duck, squirrel, even bear!
We eat a lot of fish though. Our favorite is crappie. I have said crappie before to some folks in the north and they look at me like I'm crazy, so I think it must be more of a Southern thing. Crappie fishing is great around our parts and easy and fun to catch. They are delicious to eat also.

Our daughters have been going fishing with us ever since they were tiny, but for whatever reason my oldest one is just now taking an interest in cleaning or scaling fish.

She was so excited to help her dad scale our recent catch. She worked so hard and wanted to make sure that the fish SHE scaled was the fish SHE ate that night for supper....

It's such a blessing to pass on skills like this to our children. I dare say that there are not many 5 year old girls that can bait a hook, catch a fish, then scale it BY HERSELF. Very proud of her.

You know the saying: If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Baby is here.... busy as always

Well first thing first, we welcomed a new little blessing into the world September 29th. I'm glad to report that both he and I are doing very well. He was a whopper ( 9 lbs 12 ozs) and the girls are just crazy about him.

Around the home front, we still have a few things producing, but it has slowed down considerably. Which is fine due to the fact that having a newborn takes a lot of time:) My husband and girls have been great though about helping out.

Greens!
We have tons of greens. Mostly mustard and collards, and about every evening when it gets a bit cooler they will go pick a big batch. A little trick to gteting nice greens is to not pick them in the heat of the day, the leaves are wilted, but if you wait until a little later in the evening they perk back up, giving you crisper, fresher tasting greens.

Okra!
Still getting lots of okra. Our favorite way to eat it is kind of fried, not deep fried, but just in some shallow olive oil after they have been sliced up into thin coins and rolled in some corn meal flour mixture. We also like them boiled, and before baby got here we pickled about 20 pints.

Pears!
We are getting delicious Asian pears. We have 2 HUGE trees and are getting all the pears we could possibly want. We had a cousin call the other day wanting some and he picked a 5 gallon bucket in no time and you can't tell he was even here. We eat these normally just off the tree, last year my dad and I put some up into preserves, but even though they are tasty, we found we don't eat too many preserves, so we didn't put any more up this year. We still have probably 40 from last year that are still good.

It's deer season here also so that will keep my husband and the other men around here busy. My husband isn't really a hunter, but he is great at making sausage, summer sausage, etc and is a great help to others that do hunt. Plus we always end up with at least one deer in our freezer ready for the winter. I'm sure I'll have another post about deer hunting and deer meat in the future.

So that's it for now, just trying to get back in the routine of things and trying to get enough rest....

Thankful for our home, our family and our blessings!!