Homestead Happenings in Town and Upland

I see more green than straw when I peek out my back door, so I am excited to finally be able to share a few garden pictures. Humble as they may be, I am happy!

And my potatoes are growing great, so I hilled them up with some hay.

I peeked out this morning and they are already a few inches taller since haying them! If I seem a little bit excited, it is because I am. :-)

Last week, we made chicken enchiladas - one of my favorite dishes!

I usually make my tortillas, but I got these ones from the health food store.

There is a real recipe, but here is what I do:

• Cook chicken (I boil mine with a bay leaf, garlic and onion and save the broth for soup). Remove the bone from the chicken (or use bone-less skinless!) and shred.
• Shred cheese (2 cups divided), slice 1 can olives.
• Make a thick cream sauce (3T butter and 3 T flour to make a roux and then add 1 cup milk (I replace part of the milk with chicken broth for a homemade cream of chicken soup)
• Add 1 can diced green chilies, 1 cup sour cream and 1 cup shredded cheese, 1/2 the olives.
• Load each tortilla with shredded chicken, a spoonful of cream soup mixture, and role up placing seem side down in a baking dish.
• Cover with remaining soup mixture and top with cheese and olives.
• Bake at 350 degrees until bubbly and cheese is melted.

I like to serve this with spanish rice.

On a different topic, we went camping this weekend and were very excited to see the progress being made on the foundation of the house we are building on our land in Montana. The offical dimensions are 25'3" by 40' (2 levels so 2,000 sq feet total) and what you see will be a daylight basement. The house faces the road and off to the left (where it forks) is our driveway that curves around the creek bed. Next time, I will get a picture from the road.

And more wood that Luke and the boys go on their last trip.

And I did very good this time camping! No hotdogs or chips! We made a soup that I will be sharing very soon and here is Jordan cooking elk sausage over the campfire and heating water for hot cocoa.

We went wading in the creek at one of the fishing points (in Montana) and the boys had so much fun playing in the water. I have not had one request to go to the public pool this summer, but plenty of requests to go to the creek! You can read more of our creek adventures here.

I have been dejunking and de-cluttering - you can read more about that here. I have also been sewing and hope to share that real soon along with a few other projects!