What a Ham!

Valentine's Day was a hit around here. Plenty of chocolate eaten and plenty to still eat. George cooked a wonderful dinner for the family and got me 2 new charms for my Bauble LuLu bracelet.
Pssst...wanna know a secret? This here is lighter wood and it's found in the forest. It's used to start fires like the one that is inside the smoking barrel. Nathan's Daddy showed him where to find it in the woods, and he can find it quickly now.

It's ham smoking time! We used to do it from stage one, buying the meat from NC, taking it home and laying it out, then dumping numerous bags of salt over the top of them. Coating them like it was syrup on a dry pancake. Now we buy them already salted so all we have to do is hang and smoke them with hickory and occasionally apple wood.

We put up 14 hams last week. They are already in the bag when we get them from the local ham company. Southeastern Virginia and the Smithfield area are known for their hams. We are too. We eat them at family gatherings, give them to friends,raffle them off at charities and put them in silent auctions at our reunions in WV. After a couple of days of smoking last week we'll smoke them once a week until mid-March. Then "leave 'em be," as the old folks say. We'll probably take one down and cook it in July.

" We've been blessed with some warm weather lately. It has been such a cold winter and anything above 40 degrees feels like a heat wave to me. We're still getting rid of chest colds and stomach viruses that have plagued the farm and practically the whole Commonwealth. I kept Nathan home yesterday because of a night of coughing. He was feeling better today so I sent him off to school.

Little Miss Priss found an old Sony Walkman in a drawer so I put some headphones on her and she walked around the house stopping to dance every few minutes when she heard a beat she liked. Remember when these were the rage? Or trying to jog with one? This one has a cd player so I put a Shrek II music cd in it and it was a hoot watching her face when she recognized a song.