Look at this lovely use of an old laying hen! The soup above is called congee. Also known as jook and chao ga, it's an Asian version of comforting chicken soup. My personal recipe is this:
One soup chicken
One 'stalk' of lemongrass
Three 2" pieces of fresh ginger
1.5 cups Jasmine rice
Cilantro
Lime
Salt & pepper
Put an old laying hen (previously butchered) into a soup kettle and cover with water.
Chop the lemongrass into 1.5" pieces.
Scrape most of the peel off the ginger and add.
Add salt to taste, maybe 1 tablespoon.
Simmer 24 hours on the back burner, not letting it come to a boil.
Take out the chicken and remove meat from bones.
Strain out lemon grass and ginger.
Put chicken meat back in pot and add rice.
Bring to a quick boil, then simmer until rice is porridgey.
Salt & pepper to taste.
Garnish bowls of congee with chopped cilantro and squeeze a wedge of lime into it. Heavenly!
This kind of soup can't be canned, so I freeze it with a squeeze of lime and a sprinkle of cilantro in each container.
Magnus is taking advantage of chilly nights by the woodstove. The squash are in curing before being stored in the pantry for the winter. They like a week or so of warm temps, then they will last for months in the cool dry pantry on a wire rack. The Uncle David Dakota dessert squash are all they're cracked up to be. Highly recommended!
Gemini is obviously starving to death, and needed to come up on the back porch to beg for dried apple slices through the kitchen window.
After a hard day's work at Seven Trees, humans and critters need to relax.....Gemini doesn't really like beer, but he can't help being nosey.
It's cider season in Whatcom County! Our neighbors had 33 crates of apples from their trees this year, so we pitched in to help turn them into cider.
Check out this clever work table! The top is made from wood slats, so you can dump your apples or other produce on it and hose them right off. We are definitely going to build one of these for Seven Trees.
Running the crusher is a two-handed job for some of us....a good upper-body workout.
There are little metal teeth inside the hopper that break the apples down enough to make extracting the juice easier. Once the press is full, a wooden board goes on top and a giant screw is turned to force all the juice out. The disk of apple-squishings is called a cheese. The cows got to eat a few wheelbarrows full of the spent apple pulp, which is also known as pomace.
Naturally, we filled a couple of carboys to start some hard cider brewing. We added campden tablets to kill off any wild yeast first. The old-fashioned traditional way is to let the yeast already present on the apples do the fermenting, but this can be unpredictable. We didn't want to take any chances, so we'll use Nottingham ale yeast on one batch, and a wine yeast on another. The ale-yeasted batch we'll bottle carbonated, hopefully with none exploding while they finish fermenting.
We also canned up quite a few quarts to have over the winter. The short processing time pasteurizes the cider, but it still tastes a million times better than anything from the store. Below is a short movie of the crusher in action. 
