With October here and Halloween fast approaching, I was reading over some old blog posts and thought I’d bring back an older post. This was from 2009.
Halloween is over once again. The kids love to dress up, and truthfully if I were more organized and had more time, I’d be dressing up right along with them!
The kids had fun carving pumpkins while mama prayed that no one would slice a finger off. :p
An angel and a cow, could these twins be anymore different? lol
Elsa went as an English Rider. She cheated. She went as the same thing last year. She likes things to be simple. 
Alesia considered going as Cat Woman, but then changed her mind to Zombie Diva instead.
I told her to look like she’s ‘dead’.
She looks quite alive to me.
Joshua also ‘cheated’. He went as a cowboy, again. LOL
Everyone had lots of fun, and got lots of candy.
Balkenbrij… ever heard of it?
It’s a Dutch recipe. If you were to google the recipe, you’d probably find some that talk about cooking pigs heads and all sorts of, ummm… yummy things that sound rather appropriate for a post that started out about Halloween. However, the Balkenbrij I make, isn’t so gruesome, it’s rather tasty actually.
To make our balkenbrij, I make it very much like my mom did while I was growing up. I cook ground pork in salted water on the stove, add some pork grease if I so desire. This time I mostly added just ground pork as I was using up the last meat we had from the pigs we raised a while back.
Then I boiled the water until the meat was well cooked, making sure to keep the meat well seperated into bits. I also added ground cloves. I have no idea how much, I just go by my gut on it. Added pepper too. Then about 1 & 1/4 boxes of pancake mix. Stirred it up real well, and then spread the mixture out in a pan to cool.
Once it’s cooled, it looks like this.
I almost forgot to snap a photo, so this was after I had already started cutting it out into ‘bricks’ to be frozen.
And now my freezer is stocked with lots of Balkenbrij!
And of course, we HAD to taste test it this afternoon, you know, just to make sure it’s alright. When it’s cut into the ‘bricks’, from there you slice it like thick bacon, and fry it.
I almost forgot to snap a photo of the finished Balkenbrij too, so you get a phot of a half eaten sandwich. lol
