What To Do With 30+ Heads Of Celery?

Bottoms cut off, put in compost bucket and stalks rinsed

In the box they were shipped in.

First let me start off by saying I LOVE Azure Standard! https://www.azurestandard.com/ and if you happen to be a local to me let me know and I can help you get started ordering from them.  (For those not local to me, you can do a search on their site and see if there is a drop near you!)
So, they had a special on celery this time, 1 case (about 32 or so heads) of organic celery for $11.00, yes only about 33 cents a head!  Guess what I did?  Yep, I ordered a whole case!

                                                  First I fed some to the munchkins!

                               Then I chopped until I thought my hands were going to fall off!

                              Filled both dehydrators!  Some will be ground in to celery powder.

  And some for the freezer (17- 1 cup bags to be used to flavor soups and other such goodness later)
                  We also put a couple in the fridge for snacking and gave several away!

Orchard is in Bloom! + A Recipe

See if you can identify the blossoms?  I love this time of year when new life is so abundant. I love to walk through the fruit trees and hear the bees buzzing and smell the soft scents floating in the breeze of all the fruit trees (albeit lately the breezes have been anything but soft and the scents are almost being completely  masked by the scent of the spring rains).  So tonight as I was out taking these few photos before the blossoms all disappear the following recipe came to mind!

Family Favorite Apple Crisp
10 baking apples peeled, cored and sliced
1 c. brown sugar (although I don't use quite that much)
1 c. regular oatmeal
1 c. flour
2 tsp cinnamon
1 1/2 stick butter, softened
1/2 c. apple juice

Preheat oven 375*

Put half of the apples in a greased 9x13 pan.  Blend together remaining ingredients, except the juice.  Crumble 1/2 the flour mixture over the top of apples.  Repeat.  Pour the juice over the top and bake for 35 to 40 minutes!  Serve warm with vanilla bean ice cream.

PS from top to bottom cherry, peach and apple!  Stay tuned I will try to post my family's favorite peach and cherry recipes later this week!

Spring is official...Broilers are here!

The girls are excited to see ALL those baby chicks!

Hard to believe it is that time of year, but my freezer was insisting we didn't delay raising broiler chickens until fall (however, we may get brave this year and do a SECOND batch)!  We ordered 125 (they shipped 130) chickens this year from Central Hatchery as we are always so pleased with how well they do!  We have had them 2 weeks now and haven't lost a single one which is amazing!!  Last year was our first year of using all organic feed and we were incredibly impressed with how well they grew and their overall health was so much better (we didn't lose near as many last year as we had in the past).  This year we took it one step further and locally sourced all of our organic feed!!