Baby Guinea Keets

We have had our guinea fowl about four years and the first couple of years were excited that we would have babies.  We never got any babies.  The only thing I got was jealous when I heard of other people who's guineas were having successful hatchings.  We started with eight birds and this fall are down to two, thankfully a male and female.  To our surprise they came out of the swamp the other day with, as far as we can count, 17 baby keets.  It's been three days and it looks like they still have all of them.  They are a crazier, more aggressive bird than a chicken, and they co-parent unlike a chicken, so maybe they will manage to get a couple of them to adulthood.  The keets are so tiny though they look like peanuts running through the grass after their parents.  There has also been an eagle circling the house so they better keep them close or they will go on the raptor buffet. 

Cut a Rope With Itself

So you find yourself in a situation where you need to cut a rope, but you don't have anything to cut it with. When would this ever happen?  I don't know, but that's not the point. The point is, if you ever are in a situation where you need to cut a rope, you can impress everyone with this little trick. 

Step on one end of the rope, leave some slack and step on the rope with your other foot.  Then loop the rope through the slack and pull up. 

Start sawing back and forth and, depending on how thick your rope is, in a minute or two you will have caused enough friction to "saw" the rope.

The rope is suppose to be cut on the slack part where you were sawing back and forth.  This picture shows how successful we were with that. Only one strand of the rope was cut.

We cut the rope with the part that we were sawing with.  Not sure how it worked this way so we tried other types of rope, aka yarn, and the same thing happened.  Either way, we ended up with two pieces. The only problem is if it cuts with the sawing part of the rope you can't measure how long your two pieces will be.

Dutch Oven Pizza

Step 1: Before starting the fire to make the coals to go around the Dutch Oven, remove your cat from the top of your fire pit.

Step 2: After starting the fire, bring your dog out to enjoy the evening with you. Don't forget a pillow for her to lay on because the chair is cold.

Step 3: Spray the inside of the oven with cooking spray or rub with butter.  Spread out the pizza dough and smear with pizza sauce.

Step 4: Layer on the toppings.

Step 5: Bake.  Have plenty of coals or this takes a long time to get done. 

We were baking rolls in our other oven and could have used way more coals.  It took a good 50 minutes for this to get done and it was torture waiting that long.

Step 6: Slice and enjoy!

Dutch Oven Maiden Meal

We have been scouring the thrift stores for a Dutch oven the last few months with no luck in finding one.  People must not part with them, or else it is going to go the other way and now that we finally bought one I will start seeing them for sale everywhere. We choose a traditional cast iron one with legs and the curved handle.  They make really fancy ones, but those come with quite the price tag so we went with one priced in the middle of the road.

First step in using the oven is seasoning it.  Just spray that baby all over with some Pam.  Bam, done!

For our first delicious delight, we threw in sausage, apples, a bag of cabbage and onion.  Dump it in, stir it up.

The coals to bake it need to be made before you put them on the oven.  To make them, burn logs in the fire and when they are black and charcoalish, lay them on the ground and then load some on the lid.

For the oven to bake the meal there needs to be heat from the bottom and the top.  Turn the oven every 15 minutes to avoid hot spots where your meal is burned on one side of the oven and raw on the other.  This goes for the lid as well, give that a little spin when you turn the pot.

When you are going to check how it's going in there, the suspense will be killing you, the cover needs to be completely cleaned off.  Remove all the embers and dust off the top or the meal will be adulterated with coals and ash. 

The end result was so worth the hour it took to cook this.

Vanilla Fire Starters

These fire starters are made with those cotton face cleaning pads instead of cotton balls. These stack really well and a lot would fit in a sandwich Ziploc bag and take up less room in your camping supplies.

Melt down a candle, they don't have to be vanilla like my title says.  Actually, they would be prettier with another colored candle, but vanilla is my favorite scent so that's what we had on hand.  

Our stove is broken so when I put the paper plate in to melt the wax in the "toaster" oven, surprisingly the plate started to "toast." Wasn't thinking there.  Anyway, once the wax melts, dip the cotton pad in the wax until it is completely saturated. Lay it on wax paper or some other nonporous surface so they don't stick what ever you put them on to harden.  

Try number two.  Make an aluminum foil bowl to melt the candle in.  "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work" Thomas Edison  See, we are getting smarter and it only took us one fail.

 And now the test, did it work?  Sure did, and it only used one match. We proceeded to have to have perhaps the world's smallest bonfire.  It burned quite a while though, about five minutes so you would have plenty of time to get a fire going if you didn't have all the wood handy or your tinder was a bit wet.

Handy Dandy Stick Holder

We have a lot of soft wood trees in our yard which means that we could be picking up sticks each and every day.  Since we can't burn them fast enough we pile them up by the bon fire area and break off some when we have a fire.  We have a lot of bon fires but the stick pile never really goes away or it doesn't go away for long.  As the summer goes on the grass grows up through it, it looks like heck and it is a good place for little vermin to call home.  To combat a wee bit of the pile, and have it ready for tinder when we make a fire, I made this stick holder in about three seconds.  The credit for this goes to pinterest but from what site I don't know.  To make it, you haul a cinder block to where you want your stick holder, put four boards in the block, two in each hole going differnet directions and pile on the sticks.  Done. Now I just need to make about eight more of these.