Comforts of Home!

Mmmmmm! I know this isn't the most gorgeous picture, but it is a very comforting picture. Just think...these are warm out of the oven! Homemade! I sat down with a cup of steaming hot joe, these biscuits and a jar of lemon curd. How much more comforting can you get?! Here's my recipe.

Scratch Biscuits
2 cups all purpose flour
6 tablespoons of shortening, butter or margarine
3 teaspoons of baking powder
1 teaspoon of salt

Cut all of the shortening into the dry ingredients until nice and crumbly.

Then, add...
1 cup of milk or buttermilk (I add 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup of either sour cream or plain yogurt)

Stir this all together until the ingredients are nice and wet.
Dump the dough onto a well-floured surface and knead about 6 times. This will make a few flaky layers.
Pat into about a 1/2 inch slab.
Cut with a biscuit cutter or a floured drinking glass.
Place on an ungreased baking pan.
If you have dough left over, gather it, fold it once or twice and pat into another 1/2 inch slab.
Cut more biscuits.
When you don't have enough left over to cut, make a hand-styled biscuit (see top left biscuit).
Bake at 400 degrees until nicely browned.

Blessings

My Hubby and I are very very blessed. We count our blessings every day.

We have a decent house with a very warm atmosphere. We work at it constantly to get it the way we want.

We are watching our pennies so we can pay off our bills. However, we had to make a not-so-frugal purchase, lately.

Let me explain. We are working hard to pay off our debts...land...mortgage...a couple of credit cards. We are whacking at them really hard. Dave Ramsey is my hero. However, even he wouldn't agree with this purchase.

We had Thanksgiving at our house again this year. It is my holiday to celebrate with family and friends. Our old dining set had a very bad set of creaks and cracking going on. It was 35 years old when we received it as a gift. We had it for 18 years, ourselves. We donated it to someone who needed a dining set. We knew our chairs were on their last legs - so to speak. We actually held our breath during the fellowship as we had done some work to shore up the chairs. So we went out to get something more stable. This is really stable. The price was very good. I hope Dave won't complain too much.

We had our first dinner at the table this evening. It was nice and comfortable and romantic. We needed that!

I made a new recipe and we enjoyed it very much.

Take care. I hope all of you are in a better situation than you deserve. (kinda, sorta what Dave says.)

Chicken News

Hubby and I have decided to be nice to our chickens this year.

We live in a temperate zone, so we don't have much snow. Last year was actually the first year we had any kind of snow since we moved to South Carolina. However, it does get really cold here. It freezes at night and gets to a max of 45 degrees during the day over several of the winter months.

Well, last year we bought a torpedo heater to keep the chickens warm in the barn. No...we didn't cook them! The roof is very high in the barn so we really don't know how well it kept them at a decent temperature. Here's the nice part. We bought wood to lower the roof over the inside part of the barn for the chickens. We hope this keeps more heat in their area so they stay warmer. I'm sure it will. We'll set the automatic thermostat to around 40 degrees so they won't freeze. It's actually nice in the barn for humans at 40 degrees when the barn doors are closed.

Yesterday I helped Hubby with the roof framing. Today the yard boy helped with putting the plywood roof over that.

I'll try to remember to keep you posted on how this works.

Take care. Happy farming!