Shmoopywood

This blog has been up and down over the last month, You are unable to comment, I have been unable to update. Because of this, I have moved my primary blog back over to http://shmoopywood.blogspot.com so if you want to link to me or follow me in a reader, this may not be the best address as it is just a mirror at this point.
thanks

Interestingly enough, today is hatch day and I am proud to announce that eggs actually hatched! Imagine my surprise when something that I have attempted actually worked!
We set 12 *cough* 14 *cough* eggs in the evening of 1/15/2010 which put us all the way on 2/5/2010 for a hatch date. Yesterday we were excited to see that by bed time, 5 eggs had pipped. Pipped means they are starting to crack the egg a bit to come out.
I kind of knew that when I got up in the morning, I would have 1 baby.
I did not realize that when I woke up, I would get to see [...]

I guess I never stopped to think about how much we rely on pre-packaged foods in our every day life. I didn’t realize it until I decided to make Sunday dinner with fresh ingredients from scratch! Now keep in mind, I dont have a farm so I don’t have fresh milk or beef and I did used store bought flour and mozzarella. But still making today’s menu from scratch STILL proved to be a challenge for me!
The menu:
Sausage and Cheese Lasagna
Bread
Blackberry Turnovers made from our blackberry bush jam we canned in September.
The Specifics:
The Lasagna

I made the spaghetti sauce from scratch over christmas and stored the sauce and some meatballs [...]

The great bread show down has been completed!
The rules were simple, Blog vs Book bread. Each contestant had to choose their bread from either blog or book, and they had one chance to bake a loaf.

It started as early as 8am Sunday Morning when Lisa (thats me) could not sleep and decided to bake her loaf of bread. She gathered her supplies, rubbed the sleep from her eyes and began to create a masterpiece using a blogger’s long tested recipe (one of you guys!). She slaved, and worked, and then set it aside to rise while she ate her Kashi Go Lean crunch cereal.

It may not be pretty but here [...]

Step on up!
Dave and I have decided that we need to have a contest. We are the contestants and the kids are the judges. Since we have decided to make more things from fresh ingredients we have been searching for the perfect loaf of bread. I keep raving about how wonderful my blog friends recipes are, and he thinks that the book bread is going to be the best of the best.
You can probably see where this is going right?
Tomorrow we are having a contest to search for the best bread
blog bread vs. book bread
Of course I will not say publicly which blog I got the recipe from just [...]

In an effort to try to gain back my full flock after this winter’s troubles, Dave and I have decided to set some eggs for hatching. We have easy access to fertilized eggs so we are totally cool with hatching little mutts for our own personal flock. I mean if this goes well maybe I will buy some cochin eggs or wyandottes for the future of SWood flock but for now as an experiment we are just hatching our own eggs.
I learned first how to tell if an egg was fertile by cracking open 4 of our eggs (we ate them) and carefully examining them, running back to google and [...]

As I sat at my desk yesterday, I hear the familiar “bing” of new email received. It was about 4, and my day was over at 4:30. It was from hubby telling me about a chicken rescue. My heart just sank because I found myself back in the same spot I had been in many times over the last few weeks. I was once again faced with losing a chicken.
Let me back track a bit so you can understand. Our flock was solid at 12 hens and a Rooster. We spent the summer learning how to care for them. They were easy really. We use the deep litter method so [...]

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I have to thank those of you who have hung on and kept shmoopywood on your blogroll, reading list whatever you have kept us on. We have been on a brief hiatus. I have had to deal with some personal issues, not the least of which was losing my father. We are back though and I promise to start updating more regularly!
There are a lot of things planned for 2010, we have already started discussions about the garden. We learned a TON last year. We really did make it very hard for ourselves. We created our first garden ever, made it organic and used heirloom seeds! No [...]

Today we got 9 eggs!! We only have 10 hens!! they were neatly laid in a pseudo nest on the floor in the corner. Silly girls…
So I think all 10 of our hens are laying now. YAY!
thats all i have!