Jerky!

Every now and again, your husband may decide to make beef jerky with his fancy dehydrator thing.

The dehydrator.  It lives in the mudroom.  Takes up too much counter space!

 Every now and again, he might salt the heck out of said jerky.   Aka prepare to drink a boat load of water!

But it's all good, someday I'll use that dehydrator to do something really cool...like make dried fruit or something.  In my free time.  HA!  (ie. I will probably never make dried fruit.  But I'd like to.  Kinda like that moment when you realize you'll never complete even 1/100th of the cool things you've pinned on Pinterest.  Life goes on.)

Anyway, when you're making jerky in a dehydrator, you've gotta rotate the trays every four hours (so every layer can be dried evenly).  It's not that it's a time comsuming activity, just something to think about/is on your conscious radar throughout the day. 

Rotate your dang trays!

Here is a sign your husband may be thinking entirely way too much about rotating his jerky trays:

Scene: Early morning, both sound asleep, sun is still down.
Hubs:  Thrashes wildly, sound of water spilling.
Me: Rolls over,  "Huuhhh?..."
Hubs: "It's ok honey, I just knocked over a glass of water."
Me: "Why?.."
Hubs: "Well, I dreamed I was changing the jerky trays and was surrounded by a pack of wolves.  They where trying to get my jerky and I had to keep swatting 'em away!  So I guess I swatted this glass of water instead."
Me: "Bahaha!  I'm just glad I didn't get unconsciously swatted by accident!"

Think of me next time you enjoy some tasty jerky. (And keep me in mind if you run across a recipe that uses less salt!)

Yum?

Haulin' Hay

The hubby and I hauled hay the other day.  Which actually means I sat in the tractor and 'supervised.'  Not really.  I sat in the bouncy little sidekick seat and enjoyed some quality time with the devilishly good looking man I married.   

Anywho, this is the proper procedure for haulin' hay...
1) Take your tractor, your hay trailer, and your oh so useful wife out to the baled hay pasture.  This is the trailer we used the other day.

2) Park your hay trailer somewhere and find yourself a lone round bale.  Now spear the heck out of  it! 

3) Take your bale, tractor, and wife back over to the hay trailer and drop off your speared chunk of forage.  But do it carefully or the trailer's gonna tip...this definitely DIDN'T happen...hehe.

Why in the world did I think it was a good idea to snap all these photos from inside the cab??

4) Repeat step 1-3

5) Make you fall in love with meeee! (Name that 90's song!)

5) (For real) The trailer we used could hold six bales, so after loading up six, we speared a seventh with the front bale spike (cause farmers are efficient like that) and hauled everything over to the hay yard. 

6) And unloaded it all from the trailer in nice, straight rows.  I don't know if I can express how bumpy and rutted-up the hay yard was...I think my teeth almost fell out!  I know my badonkadonk left the seat and I'm pretty sure we were airborne on more than one occasion (just kidding).  That's what happens when you have to use a tractor to feed round bales to the cows in the winter time when the ground is half frozen, half mud, and all gross.      

7) Then did the whole thing all over again! And again, and again, and again...

This was actually taken in the early spring.  See all that weird, green stuff on the ground??  Totally a foreign concept right now.

Now these girls will have something to eat come winter time!  Gotta feed the cow so the cow can feed you.  Now go have some beef for dinner, Matthew McConaughey says so!