When your hubby informs you he is going to smoke his butt....

You either have a very interesting story to tell, or you are about to spend your Sunday watching your hubby smoke a Boston Butt in his homemade smoker!  Lucky for me, my hubby was doing the latter and we had a wonderful meal to end an awesome weekend.

This weekend screamed Spring here in Central NC.  Saturday was a little cool but sunny and beautiful and Sunday was downright magnificent.  On Saturday, hubby and I finished some lingering yard work.  I planted our lettuce crop and put some finishing touches on the garden fence project.  We also learned a great method of herding the chickens to the garden from their coop and back without stressing them or ourselves (see previous post about me chasing chickens around the garden :-)

Sunday was an early start of smoking, cooking, baking, and cleaning.  Hubby got up at 8am to start the fire in the smoker and I made him some french toast from homemade bread and bacon.  After breakfast, I baked sugar-free all natural chocolate chip cookies (for me) and all-natural peanut butter cookies for hubby and our pending guests for the evening!  After baking the cookies, I started boiling the Northern Beans on the stove and mixed together a baked bean sauce from scratch (an amazing recipe I found here).  By lunch we had baked beans ready to go on the smoker and a Boston Butt well on it's way to perfection!  After lunch I headed out to the yard and picked up all of the sticks the oak trees have been dropping....thinking to myself "this is why our parents made us pick up sticks as kids"....that was not a fun job!  I spent the rest of the day relaxing by the garden fence watching the chickens scratch and hubby continued to monitor the smoker.

The best part of the weekend came on Sunday night.  My folks and my brother, sister-n-law, and their two boys came over for dinner.   We had the smoked pork, homemade baked beans, slaw, cornbread and oven potatoes, cookies for dessert and a whole lot of family fun! 

It was a perfect end to a perfect weekend.  I am happy that I can finally get to work in the yard and start planning more for the Spring.  I couldn't help but laugh as my dad said "love what you are doing with the back forty".  But, even though our humble acre is not a huge farm, I continue to love what we can do and how it helps me visualize our dreams for the future....maybe one day we really will have a "back forty"!