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You’re welcome. BTW, I think you could leave out the beef and double the chicken and the stew would be quite good ... just call it Chicken Brunswick Stew!

As kids, we were SO lucky to have grandparents that lived on farms. Mom’s parents were on a more traditional farm with all the animals. Dad’s folks were spread between 3 farms and the ‘home place’, although it had a kitchen garden, was mainly used for pasture.

It used to “kill” my NC grandparents’ routine when we would be visiting. They would be up at 5 to milk the cows and get all the morning chores done. As kids, we loved collecting eggs, watching Granny squirting kitties in the face with milk as she hand-milked 3 or 4 cows for their own use (the rest were milked with machines in the dairy). Granddaddy was German, didn’t have a lot of patience and the cows weren’t used to us .... so when they saw us watching in the dairy, they would start backing up in the doorway, afraid to come in. We would try to hide, but that just made it worse .... then we looked (to them) like we were going to ambush them!

Granny & granddad would do their best to be very, very quiet in the morning & to sneak out for chores without waking up ‘us kids’ ..... it hardly if ever worked. Granny would give us a homemade cinnamon roll and make us some oatmeal .... the milk was from the cows she milked and unpasturized, kept in a mason jar in the fridge. I have never been able to duplicate that oatmeal - it was just incredible. Then, we were off to follow them around on the chores - even though we made things hard for them, they always let us participate and watch & never complained (but the cows who wouldn’t go into the milking parlor definitely got yelled at in German!).

As I said before, we kids were so very lucky to have a chance to see how it was to live life on a real farm and to have some great adventures.