The girls are coming home for the holiday! I'm so happy. Today I'll make granola and mama's bread, a silky white concoction with powdered milk and potato flour in it. I'll clean out the fridge to make room for Thanksgiving dishes. The dining room table is covered with papers that I'm trying to organize for work -- that chore has to be done in time to unfold the sunflower covered tablecloth and lay it out in place.
In addition to farming, parenting, working, and getting ready for the upcoming holidays, I'm also painting more these days. I stopped for about a year and recently challenged myself to paint a simple still life of apples and indian corn. I really love painting, just ran out of ideas of what to paint so this is helping getting the creative juices flowing. I'm looking at the world a bit differently too, taking mental notes on scenes that I'd like to capture on canvas.
The co-op is meeting here today for a delivery too. We're getting our veggies and fruit from a local distributor who specializes in native foods. They do a great job, but their prices have been skyrocketing. Still cheaper than the grocery store for us to buy in bulk together, but we're only doing it once a month, instead of weekly, the way we used to. Everyone is getting much more careful with stretching their food dollars around here.
Rose's grocery store in NY State had London Broil for $2.99 a pound and it was very nice meat -- our tourist town store had a lesser quality cut for $6/lb. Vermont's store prices are too high, so most people stay away from certain foods nowadays. We'll have USDA inspected grass-fed beef for sale soon and I hope we can sell it at a good price to our co-op members and others.
Ahhh -- I also have to render pork fat into lard today, before the girls get home. They like the pie crusts that are half butter and half lard, but they don't know the lard is in there. They think it's toxic or something. Makes the best pie crusts though!