Nothing To Show For It

Hear that laughter. Hear that laughter. Woo! Yeah, I'm towards the end of the vlog. Getting his laughter on a playground. I'll tell you how we ended up on a playground in a minute. I went to make sure we caught that on camera. Audio's not working. Was not working. All morning. So happy day. Let me recap things for you. It all started with Lily starting breakfast before she went out and do chores. She's so studious, and she would come back in after chores to it almost done. The boys stoked our fire to continue working on the organic debris from Hurricane Helene. Then this was the big project. I, I assessed the cattle panel and sort of got an idea of what I would need to do today to build a chicken What do you want to call this? Chicken arch over the run for their winter comfort. Then did chores. I tested to see if chickens would eat pig fat. Made a TikTok about it too. They love the pig fat. I took the kids to do inventory while we waited for the vet to come to check out Blaze. He's been having, uh, he's just been, uh, sensitive since we got back from vacation. This is what I hate the most that we missed, uh, because this would probably have been content for Lily's channel. But anyway, they did a, uh, I don't know, stethoscope, something. They stuck it down his nose with a camera, and we were able to confirm that Blaze does have ulcers. Uh, I guess it's just sores on your stomach from stress. Oh, so we're doing a lot of different things to address the stress, long-term and short-term. I'm sure more from Lily on that later. Bolt came off for the track loader, but Jonah fixed it. Four-wheeler won't start. We've charged the battery. It'll— is that turnover? But it won't start. We're gonna have to figure that out. Then to Lowe's to get some supplies. I wanted to get half-inch, 20-foot-long rebar, or at least go to Lowe's and test it. I tested those 3/8 inch rebar I had at home that were 10 feet wide. I asked Jonah if he could weld them together— 10 feet long— weld them together. He thought he could, but the problem would be the joint would be up in the middle where the pressure is, and that's probably not going to hold. So I wanted to go to Lowe's to see how flexible a 10— 20-foot 3/8 is versus a half inch. They didn't have any 20-foot pieces. So sort of in vain, but from there I could go and look at some maybe ways of how we're going to hold these rebars to the, to the fence. And I'm thinking we're going to use these half-inch metal conduit straps. Here is how we ended up at the playground. I wanted to go to the car wash. That's like $10, and that's fine. I mean, they're coming with me on chores, fine. And then I thought, oh wait, there's the library playground. It's free. Which would you want? Gideon wanted to go to the car wash. Henry wanted to go to the playground. So free and activity in the sun ruled out, and that's why we're here. I need to tell them we need to go. Okay, it's time to go. I let you be here more than 15 minutes. Do it, do it! Okay, 30 minutes. No, no, we've been here 30 minutes. Good, let's go. Come on! It's $80 for delivery. Does come tomorrow for the chicken stuff. Can't fit in the truck. Might be able to fit it in the flatbed trailer though. Ish. Puts it over the roof with blankets. Plus I had to buy an extra one to get scheduling, so we're looking at $90. We could do our flatbed trailer and lay it on, goes over the back. We could tie it down. Just a little extra caution. Could put it over our truck with a blanket wrapped around it if we had to, but we saved the time. It's going to take us at least an hour and a half to drive to town and get it, get it secured, get back. All right, it feels a little incomplete. I don't have 20-foot rebar. Um, I did order it and we are going to pick that up. And may rain tomorrow, which I'll fill this Guilty about, bad about going to town if it's raining because I can't do anything here. Lily, I'm trying to say. I also got some office hours done, working on my book. I need to rest. I feel like I could have maybe done more, but I need to know, you know, I put the work aside and now it's time to focus on dinner. A lamb rice pilaf. Huh? Yeah, exactly. What's a pilaf? Austin, pilaf? I asked Grok for like 3 different, 5 different lamb recipes, and I'm going with this one, okay? Because it's a combo of lamb and rice. On today's episode of Burn It Up Cooking Show, lamb rice pilaf. You know how to dice? Yeah. Okay, good. You dice. Love cooking in this thing. Gigantic Dutch oven. It's a Staub. I think I'll leave the link for it in the description. This is where the burn it up part comes in. We've got some sort of weird oil in there. We're cooking with cheddars. We got crap still on the burner. We got spices with no lids. Rinse the rice, and then I guess when you get done doing that and the garlic, get the chicken broth up here. All right, I think I can get this off now. Yep. Yeah, see, we don't want to cook in that. We're making our own allspice. Uh, calls for a third of a— it calls for a teaspoon, so we're going to do a heaping 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon. Maybe hopefully that's a third. Brand new nutmeg, a heaping quarter of nutmeg, and heaping Hang it close. Shouldn't allspice have allspice in it? Put the beef fat in there. Here, put some beef fat in there for your cooking fat. So it's mostly cumin. It's so cool you can put it into Grok, like, give me a— the, the, the pilaf recipe if I have 5 pounds of beef, and then it breaks it all down. This is gonna be interesting. This calls for raisins. Got our spices. Pepper tastes too. I have no idea, so I did a teaspoon. Cut it really fine, Dar. Let's let it brown It wants you to fry that, get the rice fried after you put the meat in, but it's not going to be coming in contact with the surface, so that's not going to work. Let's fry it on the pan. Well, these people are professionals, so they know. Well, it's Crock-Pot. Sometimes it gets a little wonky. Let's add the garlic, Lily. The onions are brown. The garlic just takes a minute. Man, I'm excited about this. You know, I was thinking I was— I did underestimate this. Brown lamb. This is browned. That's awesome. This is all brown. Stir it, stir the seasoning in, and then scrape this out. Let's get— you having a dance? You feeling good? This is my stiff dance. Is that— I'm doing a good dance? 8 cups of chicken broth. I will put the, um, the, uh, Super Cubes, those handy dandy, like, hey, just pick out 2 cubes. He's a measurable, uh, device for making that happen. S-O-U-P-E-R. You guys like our cow handle on this thing? Okay, pilaf is a Middle Eastern dish of rice or wheat cooked in broth, usually accompanied with meat or vegetables. So we're doing a lamb pilaf. I see you put the parsley on it. I did. Josiah, have you tried it? Yeah. Passed the Chandler test? Yeah. What? Okay, I'm a little nervous. It probably needs salt. Yeah. Okay, okay, you could add raisins. Or almonds. Well, the pilaf was a little bit of a redemption because today, in homesteading today, I didn't have anything to show for my efforts. Some days are like that. But we made a little progress, a little bit at a time. I'm gonna have to settle in that. The, the lamb rice pilaf, we had something to show for it, and we're stinking full. Happy day.