Wildflower Adventures: Happenings on the Homestead in the Appalachian Mountains

Hello there Adventurous Friends & Family, greetings from Georgia. Happy New Year, how you doing this 1st week of 2024? There was no "Blizzard of 23" to tell about this week. There were a few snowflakes that fell from the sky that gave a feel & smell of snow, the roads looked like they had been treated with some kind of liquid ice melt & I saw a plow truck filled with salt & sand ready to go. I was prepared to hunker down for a few days & not leave the house during my 3-day weekend, though we were able to go ahead & do the last of our planned Christmas activities. Grab a coffee or your favorite beverage & I'll show you some memories of the "Blizzard of 93" & tell you about going to Babyland, Christmas at Granny's, leather britches & an apple stack cake, come walk with me...

* The Grandgirls got Christmas gift vouchers to get a cabbage patch doll at Babyland. I was invited to go along for the selection & adoption of the new dolls. Mother Cabbage went into labor twice while we were there & gave birth to 2 of the original handstitched style dolls. The 1st one was a boy. He was named David Mason. The nurse asked for name suggestions from us spectators. Grand's suggestion of David was chosen. The 2nd birth was a girl that had already been adopted before it was born. I enjoyed the parade of Christmas trees & all the Christmas decorations. Some of the available dolls were dressed in Christmas outfits. Kevin & I had took Daughter to Babyland when she was a little girl. Back then the only dolls were the more expensive original hand stitched ones. Now they have every imaginable doll accessory available. They have stuffed animals of all sorts, big & little. They have hand stitched & manufactured dolls in a variety of different price ranges. There was lots of stuff to walk around & look at.

A section of the cabbage patch
where Mother Cabbage goes
into labor & gives birth.

See Grand sitting there?
He blends in with the dolls.

The final choices of their doll to adopt & take home.

There were lots of areas set up for taking pictures.

Mother Daughter look alikes.
She'll represent 5 generations
in August when Great-Grand
is expected to arrive.

* We went to Granny's to have Christmas with her & Sister. It was a child's Christmas fantasy come true with all the presents Sister had for the Grand's. There was ham & all the fixings including a couple of my favorites of Moma's cooking, her green beans, mashed tators & gravy. For dessert there was peanut butter pie, chocolate chip pound cake & pumpkin rolls. I filled the empty spaces in the 2 food dish I brought with leftovers to take home.

This one has my name on it.

Hand painted ornament done by Sister.

* Our New Year's Day meal was a bear roast, stewed tators, leather britches, apple stake cake & cornbread. I'm glad I encouraged Kevin to follow through with the menu he planned out for his beans & apples. I'm glad Kevin encouraged me that we needed to make the cake & see how to cook the beans on New Year's Eve instead of waiting to do it all on New Year's Day. Come to find out... the beans needed to soak in water before throwing them in the pot to cook. The stack cake was supposed to sit for 2 days before cutting it. I was up at 5:30 to put the roast in the crockpot. I had forgot there were still pinto beans in the crockpot sitting in the fridge. Sleepy eyed, I had to find another container to put the beans in & clean up the crockpot before putting the meat in. Kevin went hunting. He didn't bring home any meat though he did say he had a good walk, saw lots of deer sign & a horned tree.

How to cook leather britches.
Dried green beans soaking overnight
in water for about 24 hours.

It doesn't look like many beans when
they are dried & vacuumed sealed.
It was the same with the apples.

Adding the spices to make the
apple filling from apples Kevin
dried back in August.

It's said that the stack cake needs to have an odd number of layers, at least 5. Our cake had 5 layers. It's also said that cutting into the cake as soon as it is made is a disservice to the cake & the cook. The cake needs to set for a time to let the flavors blend & moisten the cake. We let ours sit overnight. You can put the filling around the edges or not. Kevin wanted not. He said he likes to see the crispy edges & all the layers. You can put the filling on the top layer or not. Kevin wanted to put filling on the top of ours. Some folks put powdered sugar on the top & use some sort of stencil such as a cookie cutter to make a design such as a star when the cake is ready to serve. I read that stories have been told about poor mountain brides who could not afford a wedding cake were given stack layers by friends & family. The more layers, the more popular the bride. The layers were stacked, filled & cut on the spot. The story didn't add up over the years because it seems a freshly stacked cake is really not a gift at all. A stack cake was & still is a labor of love & usually made for celebrations. Making a stack cake is a special occasion by itself.

Stacking up the layers & putting filling
between each layer.

Everything turned out good & decent.
The beans were pressure cooked for about
20 minutes. We thought maybe they needed
to be cooked a little longer next time. The
bear meat cooked on high for about 6 hours.
It was plenty tender & juicy. We ended
up dipping bites in BBQ sauce. That was a
big piece of cake & I couldn't eat it all.

Our special occasion labor of love apple stack cake.

* Memories from the "Blizzard of 93". It seems I made some scrapbook pages about it sometime or another. Daughter was about 5 years old. We had horses at that time that we rode for pleasure. The horses were in a pasture about a mile away. I walked down the road & brought the horses to the house where we had a barn. There were lots of bent over & broken trees. We were out of power for about a week. We had a wood heat stove at the time. We were able to keep the house warm as usual & cooked on the wood stove. I remember we had young chickens that still needed heat. Kevin brought them in the house in cages & boxes near the wood stove so they could keep warm too. We put the refrigerated stuff out on the deck in the snow to keep the food cool. No one we know even owned a snow shovel.