Weekly Update: 11.25.23
And you shall eat and be full, and you shall bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
Deuteronomy 8:10, ESV
This verse felt like the theme of our Thanksgiving this year. The holiday came at the end of a difficult few weeks, which made it all the more meaningful in some ways. We were relieved that no one else got sick this week, and except for a few lingering coughs, everyone finally seems better. When we have difficult spells, focusing on the blessings around us helps cultivate gratitude and battle discouragement. We always come back to the blessing of finally being here on our land. When you have wanted something for decades, finally achieving it feels like a never ending grace. It can be really difficult, yes -- but it is so worth it.
We worked on the house during the first part of the week. It was cold with rain some days, but we stayed warm and mostly dry working inside. We warded off the chill using a propane Big Buddy heater. We put up the rest of our interior walls (the bottom 8-feet of them anyway) and we installed most of our pocket door frames. We still need to finish extending the walls to the vaulted ceiling, but it feels good to see the floor plan in place. Due to the weather, we had Dagger and Tilde in the house with us for several hours most days -- and that kept things interesting, to say the least.
Grace found some time to build a cat tower. The stray kittens that joined our homestead have stayed, even though their mama hasn't been here for a couple weeks. We found out that the stray cats also spend time at a neighboring farm, and the mama cat has been there for awhile now. It appears she purposefully left the kittens here. We decided to call the cats Tolkien-themed names -- the gray kitten Gandalf the Gray and the black kitten Arwen. There is also a gray and white cat (whom the kids have been calling Galadriel) that spends most of her time at our place, though she won't let us get too close to her. She typically sleeps with the kittens and will sometimes call them into the woods to, ostensibly, go hunting. After talking to our neighbor, we believe she is the older sister of the kittens. I had no idea cats would move around in extended family groups, but I guess they do.
We had tried to encourage the cats to sleep in our rarely-used dog house by boarding up the front except for a tiny cat door. Instead, the cats have continued to sleep on the porch, often in baskets or boxes we have things stored in. We decided they needed a dedicated shelter that we could push up against the tent wall where it could be warm. We had a closed up vent from our air conditioner that we thought we could open up and use to heat the kitty house. Grace started the project one evening and finished it the next day. Gandalf and Arwen took to it immediately, with even skittish Galadriel sleeping there during the night.
By the time Thursday arrived, we felt ready for some well-deserved celebrating. Our holiday started sweet, as our brother Jeremiah made everyone Belgian waffles on his new Cuisinart waffle iron. I was impressed -- as the iron turned out waffles that were consistently tall and crisp. We topped the waffles with buttermilk syrup, which has become a family favorite this year.
It was our first Thanksgiving without a kitchen. Life has been so crazy, we figured we would enjoy a pared down feast. We headed into the holiday armed with several slow cookers, an Instant Pot, a hot plate, an electric skillet, and an electric griddle -- and we kept our expectations low. Grace, Erin, and I started with making our desserts on Wednesday -- two pecan pies (cooked in a slow cooker) and a pumpkin pudding refrigerator cake. Mom and Bonnie-Jean started some slow-rise English muffin dough that day as well.
We planned to deep fry the turkey. About a month ago, we purchased a 30-quart fryer. We loved the idea of cooking our turkey this way, and we looked forward to using the big pot for soup and maybe even a batch of hard cider. I started to unbox the fryer on Wednesday, only to realize that the directions said you could not fry a turkey in our set up. We had accidentally bought a huge crawfish boiling and fish fry (in an included smaller pot) set. While many of the components of a turkey fryer were there, it did not have certain safety features necessary for heating a huge pot of oil. We didn't have time to replace the fryer, so we scrambled to figure out what to do with the 12-pound turkey we had already thawed out. We considered grilling it or frying it in small batches, but ultimately we opted to put the whole thing in our 8-quart slow cooker.
We slow cooked the turkey overnight. A blog post from A Simpler Life was really helpful with this process. The turkey wouldn't fit in the slow cooker, so we decided to quarter it first. I was thankful to have my Dad's help, as he grew up on a turkey farm and is adept at dismembering large fowl. I was skeptical that we could fit the whole bird in the slow cooker, but we did. I seasoned it with a couple tablespoons of salt and a cube of butter. We set the slow cooker on low and went to bed. We woke up to our tent smelling deliciously of roasting meat. It was done when we woke up, so we put it outside to cool before carving it. We weren't sure what to expect, but the results were incredible -- delicious, moist turkey so tender it fell off the bones.
The rest of the fixings turned out similarly well. We made The Pioneer Woman's Instant Pot mashed potatoes, country gravy (started in the electric skillet and transferred to a slow cooker), slow cooker green bean casserole, fried okra in the electric skillet (we forgot to thaw it and had to rush the process by laying it on the warm woodstove), hot plate cranberry sauce, English muffins on the electric griddle, and some box stuffing. Everything turned out fantastic. I honestly can't remember a Thanksgiving meal I enjoyed more.
It all tasted especially good as we squeezed around our table in our little wall tent. Sitting around the table looking at the people I love most in the world, I was so thankful to be living this dream together.
We have just a week before December starts and Advent begins. As with Thanksgiving, no matter what the Christmas season looks like for us this year, it's going to be special just having Christmas in our wall tent. We have talked about how busy we are right now and how difficult it will be squeezing in holiday festivities on top of already packed days. Still -- we love Christmas, and we plan to make some time for festivity and fun. No matter what, we look forward to the season focused on remembering Christ's first coming and anticipating His return. The holidays are officially upon us. Cheers!