Dining at the Huntley farm

To this day, I still find it difficult to picture Tim Huntley, the president of our company Ganymede Software, as a farmer. But a farmer he is, and an excellent one. Each time we visit, there is something new to see. A while back it was the goats, but the goats are gone now. This time it was meeting the new cows, Penny and her calf Daisy. Daisy was a sweetheart and came over to get her head scratched.



Tim also has about 20 beehives now. Yet another big project.

The boys, Neal and Evan, seem just about perfect. They're polite, fun, and seem great at entertaining each other. They go to a brand new school that can't be more than a half mile away. They seem quite happy and it is nice to find kids today that don't spend every second with their nose in a video game. Jenny does a lot of volunteer work at the school. My favorite job she does is the lettering for the school's sign out front. They would let me do that for no more than a day or two before I would spell something that only I thought was funny.

In this picture, they stand proudly after I got my butt whooped 10-4 in Foosball. I knew I should have learned from the Wolfpack this weekend and just stopped when I had a 1-0 lead. They told us they wouldn't normally both wear a red shirt, but they did it to honor NCSU and us as their guests.



I wish I had grabbed a photo of the end result, but it was too tasty to wait for. Our dinner was homemade pizza. We started with freshly made pizza dough and then went through the fixin's bar to customize each one. There was red pepper, garlic, mushrooms, sausage, sun dried tomatoes and much more. Yum.

Then Tim took the pizzas and cooked them in their outdoor bread and pizza oven. You start a wood fire and let it burn for a few hours, heating the brick oven to over 500 degrees. Then you shovel out the remains of the fire and slide the pizzas in. They were wonderful!



It was a short visit, but such a nice one. There is just so much to see: Tim and Jenny, the boys, the cows, the chickens (dozens right now), the collection of mostly feral barn cats (and one house cat), the bee hives, the outdoor oven, the farm plantings, ....

One more thing. A few years ago Tim got me hooked on his Chipolte pepper sauce he made by smoking home-grown peppers. I don't make my own, but I buy the can in the store, grind them in the food processor, and use the sauce with lots of food. There's always some in the fridge. This time Tim gave me a taste of his homemade catsup. It was a lot spicier than store bought and had little or no sugar. Much better than what everyone thinks of as catsup. Now I just have to figure out how to buy something similar. I don't think I can duplicate Tim's 180 tomato plants and his 80 quart pot to cook them in.