TRINITY ACRES: Hunting and Happy Thanksgiving

It's that time of year again! Hunting Season!

We've got hunters and chasers.

During the week Frodo said to me, I'm just going to go walk around a bit. The joy of being able to walk around freely with gun in hand!

Frodo got the first deer of the season.

Meanwhile the bow girl... *chuckle*

I wanted to update my FB cover photo. No, I do not like FB and I hope I never grow to like FB. But, certain things that I'm involved in do use FB for communication.

We went to see "The Man who Invented Christmas"

A definite thumbs up! I loved it! So very clever. It's about Charles Dickens and writing "A Christmas Carol" IT was just AWESOME!!! Highly recommended from this house! Can't wait for it to come out on video!

And the Thanksgiving prep begins. The picture of these homemade buns is actually from "New York Week" when we tried our "Beef on Weck" SOOO GOOD! But we did the same thing for thanksgiving minus the carraway seeds and salt.

Chop, chop, chop and more chop... that said, I bought 2 big bags of onions thinking we use a lot of onions for Thanksgiving prep... we used about 2 onions (large ones). But no biggie, we eat lots of onions in things... and now will eat a whole lot more.

raw shrimp ready to sautee

Poppy getting ready to sautee the onions and celery for stuffing.

I started out nice and neat and tidy in our prep with one thing at a time... but that didn't last long, needed many hands on deck to prep so, hence, and therefore, and in conclusion, the unavoidable Thanksgiving Mess Prep.

And a little cleaning going on as well.

Meanwhile hunters are doing their thing.

On Thanksgiving day, we dressed the undressed turkey. We fill it with onion, celery, carrots and parsley after we've left it in a salt water brine for about 24 hours.

Meanwhile the girls are working on crescent sandwiches for breakfast.

Then I slather the bird in olive oil, sprinkle with pepper (salt not needed since it sat a day in salt water). Then spread fresh sprigs of rosemary and thyme on the outside.

AND!!!! We had a Thanksgiving Day calf born!

This mama is very protective of her little one. Beware.

Since we are still getting used to the new monster oven, the turkey got a wee bit overdone, but still tasted delicious.

Hunters coming in for our "dinner" (read: late lunch)

We had buns, cranberry orange jello salad, hot cooked turkey, sweet potato casserole, spinach casserole, stuffing, shrimp, sweet potatoes with maple/cranberry sauce....

... make ahead mashed potatoes, cold smoked turkey, cranberry sauce, cranberry hot drink, bait (pickled herring), cranberry/orange relish (which was actually just made for the jello salad but put it out since there was extra)

Kili is really into coloring in "camouflage!

And for dessert we have some very bad pictures here as we were drunk on turkey, I could not wake up.... chocolate pie (oh. yum.)

pumpkin pie and pecan pie

What a messy plate of desserts on a *gasp* paper plate. Trust me, after washing dishes for 16 people (we had a couple lovely young ladies join us) for thanksgiving, you definitely earn the right to a dozen and a half paper plates. We did use real forks as you can't very well eat delicious pie with a plastic fork.

since the weather has been gorgeous I wanted to try for a Christmas picture. Need I say, this is NOT going to be our Christmas picture and we did NOT succeed yet... we'll try again today....

We also took individual photos. Here is our in-house clown.

You can see the updated pictures on our "about us" page (click on the link at the top of the page)

Frodo graduates in the spring and wanted to be sure to have a photo of him upside down! So we took a whole series of photos... twice... trying to get one and voila, here he is.

Ta-da!

Getting ready for taekwondo demo team practice... no, they don't use guns... just thought it would be a summary photo of all important (earthly) things.

Love a gorgeous sunset!

I decided to have this brilliant idea to join our TKD school for an turkey fat burning-off kick box class the Saturday after Thanksgiving. On our way we naturally had to wait for a train. I was excited at this point in time.

Rosie so kindly went along with me. It was a GREAT work-out and lots of fun... but man alive am I sore! We were about 15 seconds into jumping jacks when I thought, "I'm not going to make it." and here I thought "it's only 45 minutes" how bad can it be on the body? Don't ask. However, I think I'm going to try doing kickboxing for a while. A mother of 12 kickboxing, beware and don't mess with me! :D Within the first 5 minutes I was sure my breakfast would not remain where it should. Never eat breakfast before kick boxing!! I survived.

2 deer!

We had guests for hunting this day so had to have plenty of food.

Off they go

On this day, some of the hunters saw THREE timber wolves. We "don't have" timber wolves here... I guess now we do. Frodo said he was pretty freaked out but I guess they generally don't attack people. So, we now have a pack of wolves within a 1/2 mile of our house!

Photo borrowed from Exploring Nature.

FOUR DEER, count them... FOUR!

*** BEWARE!***

deer processing photos....

Frodo took the task of removing the fur coats.

Flattened deer

ta-da!

The first tasty haunches of venison brought in to be ground.

Kili thoroughly enjoyed this process. His big job was to chase the cats away. He's getting to be such a big boy! :P

Takes many hands.

Meanwhile my little cat chaser was (not) helping me to hem the bottoms of Aragorn's new suit for the convention coming up.... (today).

Eowyn was less than thrilled to participate in the processing. She got to be keeper of the sharpee and label ziploc bags, it's about all she can handle. :D

I went to bring the first batch of ground venison to the freezers and I was so sore (from kick boxing) I didn't think I'd make it down the basement stairs, which, naturally, had a labyrinth of stuff on them.

pleasantries

Watch me ride the skin down!

Then there were murmured complaints of this one being shot in the "wrong spot" :D

Meanwhile because multi-projects go on at the same time. I needed to work on some certificates and such for the up-coming Confirmation. I'm just singing and we don't have any confirmandi, but I like to help out with whatever needs to get done.

Sam really wanted this glorious picture of his hand.

If you can believe it, in the midst of this processing process, they put a leg into the oven (broiler?) so they could eat it as they were getting hungry... the process wasn't something that made me hungry.