Annual Dressing Making Day

     Every year around this time, my grandmama picks a day for us to come over and spend the day making dressing. Its pretty much an all-day event - we make the entire year's worth all in one day and put it up in the ice cream and cool whip tubs we've been saving all year just for this occasion.

     Now i have no idea what the recipe for dressing is. I'm not a fan of the stuff (yeah, I know, unAmerican), and it's a ginormous recipe for anybody to try to take on.
  
     Last night we started cooking the chickens (4, whole) in crockpots. My grandmama also cooked 4.

Three of our fat chicks :)

Rule #1: Save your broth! You'll be needing it later.

     After we woke up this morning and cooked a couple pans of cornbread, Mama and I loaded all that and our empty containers up in the car and headed to grandmama's.

We make dressing out in my granddaddy's shop. It's kind of the Cadillac version of a 'shop', heat and a/c, knicknacks on the walls, full kitchen, plenty of room to spread out our stuff. If we have more than our immediate family at my grandparents' house to eat, there are tables and chairs set up in there so we can eat out in the shop.

Our mixing 'bowl'. 

Mama and Grandmama 

Our 'scoop'. Yeah, we're not too picky about our cookware around here...

One 'making' of dressing. We save up ice cream buckets and cool whip containers all year for this reason.

You have to use your hands to do this properly. (For anybody who happens to eat our dressing, we promise we wash our hands very very well and very very often!)

All our dressing for this year, about 15 gallons!

Me, Mama, and Grandmama :) 

 

These are pics from around the shop. Granddaddy and Grandmama have a ton of really awesome stuff they've inherited from their parents or older family members, and most of it's out here.

Singer sewing machine

Old radio

Tea kettles

I'm pretty sure this is a candle holder, but it's really neat

A yoke, painted with my great-grandparents' names - Hazel and Euree Hale

Super old telephone, complete with green lei. It actually still rings too.

This is a pretty amazing idea of my Granddaddy's - a recliner swing. It's pretty awesome. I'm definitely installing one in my future baby's room.

Propellers - my Granddaddy was a pilot. The first time I flew was with him on my second birthday. I asked him why there were ants on the window, and he said 'Honey, those aren't ants, those are cows waaay down there.' haha