Fall dropped like an ax this year. So, quick, bake a pie!
This is Cook’s Illustrated’s cranberry apple pie, made with their fool-proof crust that involves vodka. It was dang good, except that all the extra liquid made the crust a bear to work with. It stuck to EVERYTHING. I had to use a bench scraper (like a ninja, I might add) to keep things flowing. I.e., this crust is not, by any stretch, fool-proof.
Still, the end product was probably the best apple pie yet. Well, whatever, a good pie.
The tangyness goes excellently with vanilla ice cream.
OK, and, we need chickens. It gives me the willies that backyard chickens are becoming so popular… reminds me of pot-bellied pigs of a few years back. Still, modern day industrial agriculture produces the weakest representation of eggs, so we need to take matters into our own hands and make our own eggs.
So, I present, the floor of the new chicken house. Why just the floor? I don’t know what the top’s going to look like yet, but I know that opening it for cleaning and portability are both important. So…
Porta Chicken Coop Floor
Excessive Construction Detail
More later…
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2 responses so far ↓
1 Kelly // Oct 13, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Whatever you use for the top, make it raccoon-proof. We had chickens when I was a kid in MA, and the raccoons would basically kill them for sport, without even eating them. It’s grisly and sad.
You’ll also learn how dumb food-bred American chickens are– often too dumb to even come in from the cold when there’s an open doorway to the heated coop. Now I have no qualms about eating chickens at all!
And you’ll also learn the sublime deliciousness of truly fresh eggs. Nothing like it.
Get at least one auracana for the colored eggs!
2 Rian // Oct 14, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I’ve heard that bloodlust thing about raccoons. Eesh.
I’m not getting them until spring so that we can do a little travel this winter, but I think that damn book and our last batch of “organic” eggs put us over the top. Eggs from the store are mushy and depressing regrdless; they’re so weak they’re hard to separate without breaking the yolk.
Reading that the organic ones are not much better in terms of the overall process just cements things. Free-range means a little hole in the coop that they’re all too scared to use in the two weeks it’s open? Oy gevalt.
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