MLK day Festivities

I canned another meat recipe yesterday.  I canned the seasoned ground meat recipe from the Ball Blue Book using more ground deer from the freezer.  This time all the jars sealed!!!  I was so excited.  By accident, I put a tablespoon of season salt into the mixture instead of a teaspoon (I do that way more often than I like to admit) but this time the taste was AWESOME.  I don't think it would have been salty enough without it.  It was actually really quick and easy to can and a double batch of quart jars fit into the pressure cooker, so even the processing time was quick.  The taste is really good, but it is a neutral taste, so I think it would be good for tacos, spaghetti, pizzas, casseroles...anything that uses crumbled browned ground meat.

My dear husband did his own homesteadery activity yesterday.  He made homemade suet cakes.  One of his favorite winter pastimes is to shoot starlings out of the back yard with his air rifle.  He did some reading about what kind of suet cakes attract starlings and he found that the smell of peanut butter draws them in.  We picked up some suet from the meat department of the grocery store (I'm thinking it was about 2 lbs, but I forgot to look).  He brought it home and cooked it to render the fat from it.  Then he mixed in a half cup of peanut butter, a cup of corn meal and enough bird seed to make it look like the suet cakes from the store.  He then set the bowl outside to cool and harden.  When he brought it inside, he cut it into four pieces and put one piece in an old onion bag and hung it on the swingset.  I haven't seen any birds on it yet, but I haven't seen any birds at the bird feeders yet today either.  It's a shame you can't eat starlings...then again, a cat won't even eat a starling.  If you don't know why starlings are bad, check out this website:   http://www.extension.org/pages/Starling_Damage_Assessment