The Weekend Kitchen And Preparing For Selling

It has been another busy weekend at our place with lots going on both inside and out.

I made a batch of BBQ Sauce which I use as a marinade and as a sauce during the year.  Because it is a little labour intensive I make a big batch and then preserve most of it in my Fowlers Preserving Jars which means I can get away with making it only once  a year and store it in the pantry until it is needed.  It makes divine spare ribs and chicken drumsticks and has been really well received when given as a gift which can be bottled up at the drop of a hat since it is already made.

A while a go I picked up 4 x 500 g packets of kidney beans for just $1 each and I have been meaning to make a batch of refried beans for ages.  
Refried beans make a great substitute for the usual meat based sauce for nachos, can form part of a range of toppings for Mexican foods, is great served with salad and on sandwhiches and makes a great dip for corn chips.
Tonight we enjoyed it along with guacamole, salsa and corn chips.

Out side we tackled two fairly big jobs, water blasting the house and cleaning out the farm shed.

We try and water blast the outside of our house twice a year as being a timber weather board home the spiders like to spin their webs in all the little corners. The front veranda also provides the perfect home for spiders and other assorted bugs.

The other big job was to clean out the farm shed. When we first moved in this is where the tractor lived but it was barely running so we sold it.  Since then the shed has housed all the bits and pieces that we have used for farm projects (fence wire, post, roofing iron, pipes, ag pipe, garden stakes, paint and painting supplies) as well as bales of hay, sugar cane mulch and other bits and pieces.

The were lots of things that we had held onto in case we needed them in future farm projects but now that we are putting the house on the market and getting ready to move there will be no more farm projects.  So it was time to get rid of all the stuff that we were not going to need.  It feels strange to get rid of things that might be useful in the future but it will not be useful to us so we had to let it go.

We gave away some of the fence wire to a neighbour and all of the roofing iron went to the dump for recycling, which is where most of it came from originally (we took heaps from the dump when building our woodshed as we were not sure how much we would need) and we also had a great big throw out of other things.  
In total it cost us $10 for a full trailer at the dump and I am glad we have got this done as it it is another big de-cluttering job done and we will not be worried about it when it finally comes time to move.

All Tidy after the big throw out.  The timber is going to a friends place in a few weeks.

The next big job is clearing out the garage which is another place things are stored that we "might" need one day.  All going well we will tackle that next weekend.

Do you have a whole lot of stuff you are keeping for a possible future project?