This & That

Apple Streusel Bars

I had my church girls over here last week for treats and a game night. They specifically wanted fallish treats and several of the girls brought pumpkin-y things like bars, cupcakes and cookies. I should have taken a picture. One thing I was totally unaware of until I started working with these teeage girls, is that they can eat like Cub Scouts. Holy cow, I was amazed at what an important part treats play in our activities. Next month as a class, we're going to do some kind of fallish craft, with the caveat that we have a hot dog roast in the little adobe chimney on my patio. If any of you have an idea for a quick, easy wonderful craft that 16-18 year old girls would like, please let me know. I'm going to be prowling around on Pinterest, but I will take any and all suggestions. Anyway, we played a riotous game of Catch Phrase and I supplied these bars as my contribution to the treat table. I had a few Macintosh apples off one of our trees that I wanted to do something with and found this recipe in the first Our Best Bites cookbook. They are really good...in fact, one of the girls labeled them "supreme". They took me maybe 20 minutes to prepare, start to finish.

Apple Streusel Bars

SWEET PASTRY:

• 2 c. flour
• 1/2 c. sugar
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 c. real butter, softened (no substitutions)
• 1 egg, beaten

APPLE FILLING:

• 1/2 c. white sugar
• 1/4 c. flour
• 1 tsp. cinnamon
• 4 c. (about 3 medium) sliced, peeled baking apples (I used Macintosh because that's what I had, but Granny Smith or Golden Delicious would work, too.)

GLAZE:

• 2 c. powdered sugar
• About 3 Tbsp. milk 
• 1 tsp. almond extract

To prepare crust, mix flour, sugar, salt, and baking powder in a medium bowl. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or two knives until you have pea-sized crumbles. Gently mix in beaten egg.

Spray a 9×13 baking dish with non-stick cooking spray. Gently pat about 2/3 of the crumb mixture onto the bottom of the dish. Preheat oven to 350 and set aside.

To prepare apple filling, combine flour, sugar, and cinnamon and toss with apples.

Spread apples out on prepared crust. Sprinkle reserved crust mixture over apples evenly and bake in preheated oven for 40 minutes.When finished, allow to cool completely.

To prepare glaze, whisk together powdered sugar, almond extract, and enough milk to achieve desired consistency. Place glaze in a Ziploc bag and cut off a very small portion of one of the corners. (Or just use a fork). Drizzle glaze over cooled pastry and allow to harden (you can place it in the freezer to hurry things along). Cut into bars and serve.

 

This Week's 12

I've made my best effort to finish off this month's layouts for the 12 class and gotten several done this week.

This is the Fun category layout for the month, mostly because this is what we do for fun at the cabin. Used a Scrapbook Generations kit and sketch for this one as well as the next couple of layouts.

This is for the Things category, even though it's about the cabin, which is a place. It's also a thing and I'm just going with it.

And this is the Everyday Life category layout, subtitled "How I know there's been a toddler in the house..."

This is the Rituals and Traditions category layout, again with a Scrapbook Generations kit and sketch. These kits have really saved my bacon this year when things have been busy. 

Lastly for this week is this one for my Seasons category, since The Girl is in the season of her senior year. The design is a tweaked lift of a layout by Ali McLaughlin. I tore the page out of a magazine and I'm not sure which one it was.

My Week

The sixth season is in full swing at my house...actually the fifth and sixth seasons. They both sort of collide with each other. For the uninitiated, the six seasons here are Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, Hunting and Canning.

So my kitchen is looking like this. Last week it was peaches, pears and peach jam. This week it was plums (from our own tree), plum-raspberry jelly and whole garden tomatoes.

While I really appreciate being able to store and preserve the summer bounty, I am irritated by the plums. It's irrational, I know, but at our previous house, we had a mature plum tree that had the most gorgeous and tasty purple-fleshed plums. It made the prettiest and awesomely delicious jam. When we decided to put a plum tree in this yard, I specifically went looking for on with purple-fleshed fruit, and the garden center people assured me that the tree I bought did indeed have purple fruit. I ask you, does this look like purple fruit to you???? And I'm just so annoyed by this.  And I'm annoyed that I had to wait 4 years to find out that we didn't have what we wanted. My DH likes bottled plums, so I always do a few quarts of them for him, but The Girl always remarks about how gross and disgusting they look in the bottles with their kind of sickly orange flesh poking out. The skins give a really nice color to the syrup initially, but over the year, that fades to a less pink color that really does look a little gross with the orangey fruit. Perfectly safe, but not what I wanted. 

I throw some of the softer plums in the steamer/juicer with a few raspberries to do a batch of plum-raspberry jelly. Thankfully, the raspberries give the juice a pretty pink color so this jelly, which is very tasty, looks decent. My boys tell me to just put in different tree, but I can't use all the fruit this one produces effectively, so what would I do with twice the output? Like I said, I know it's irrational, but really, I'm just so annoyed by the plums.

Family Time

First off, happy birthday to my baby brother! Here he is with his family at his daughter's recent wedding. Whether they are happy occasions like this wedding, or sad ones, big family gatherings give us a chance to connect again with family we don't see very often, and that includes my own grown kids.

DH, his parents and siblings. The mom of my nephew, his other sister, is missing from the photo. We didn't want to pull her away from people who wanted to talk to her. All the 5 siblings now live in 5 different western states.

DH's brother and most of his family...his daughter, DIL, son and cute grandbaby and a couple of my kids.

My kids that were there, plus LS Boy's girlfriend.

And there's nothing quite like a baby to help soothe sad feelings. This is my Wyoming nephew's little girl. She's a cutie.

Interestingly, some things never change, like SD Boy's facial expressions but I guess that constancy is a little reassuring.

Good Byes

Sometimes there are awful things that happen. Things that are really hard to explain or understand. My nephew passed away last week. He was only 22, just a few months younger than SD Boy, and had struggled for several years with addiction. His addiction made it hard for him to be around family, so our time with him was limited for the last little while. Our sadness as a family is tremendous and we will miss his infectious smile and fun-loving personality.

I remember him like this. He's the one on the left. There were three cousins born the same year and they spent a lot of time together when they were young. 

He told my father-in-law sometime in the past couple of years that he desperately wished he could go back in time to the day when he smoked his first joint, and turn it down, because he was happy before then and he hadn't been happy since. 

We love him and we miss him. For a long time now we have missed him.

But we are so grateful for the knowledge that he is in a better place now and not struggling with the problems that he had here, and we know that we will see him again.

Spirit Week

In conjunction with Homecoming, last week was Spirit Week at the high school. This requires great imagination on the part of The Girl and she concocted just the right outfit for each day.

We started with Cowboy Day. She raided the Halloween costume box where she found the pleather vest I made for my oldest boy for Halloween when he was in first grade, I think. The real kicker to this costume was the belt buckle, however. It is DH's Grand Slam belt buckle and a prized possession. I was frankly a little surprised when he told her she could wear it, but then, she's always been Daddy's Girl. Which one of you boys is going to start up the chorus of the appropriate song?

Next came Rocker Day. The Girl wasn't as pleased with this get-up, saying she looked more like an "80's Creeper" than a rocker chick.

She was totally happy with Nerd Day, however. The pencils in the pocket were a nice touch.

Thursday was Superhero Day and she sped out before I got a picture. She still owes me and I'm going to stick to it and collect. She dressed up in an homage to Batman. 

Friday was her high school colors day...blue and white. I remember when she was a Freshman and didn't dare dress up for anything. Being a senior has it's advantages, I guess. You outgrow a little of that self-imposed timidity.

31.

It's at times like this that I realize that I haven't taken the pictures I really should have taken on the rare occasions that my grown children and their families come to visit. I'm thinking to myself, "Why didn't I take a really good picture of him? And him and his wife?" I'm kicking myself because this is most recent photo I have of my eldest son.

It's a fine photo, but it's just not the nice, casual portrait I'd like to have of him to post on his birthday, which is today. 31 years ago today, this boy made me a mom, and that has led to all kinds of good things, not the least of which is a nice DIL and cute grandboys. So we'll have to make due with this picture from their last trip out here.

Oh, and maybe this one as well. Love you, Sweetie! And no, Marc, you can't eat this either.

12, 12, 12, 12, 12.....

I managed to get a some scrapping done in between canning peaches and pears. 

This is the People category layout that documents a meeting with my online friend, Julie, that turned into a real life friend. I used a Scrapbook Generation kit and sketch for the design here and on the next two layouts as well.

Here is the Places category layout. I really struggle with scrapping vacation pictures. I don't know why, but it's really hard for me to figure out how to make it work on a layout. That's why the kids look so young here. The pictures are from 2003. Yeah.

  And the Family Stories category. It documents when my family got together when my nephew left on his church mission to New Zealand. Apparently down there, they call the country N-Zed, which explains that notation on the right side. 

The Dance

Here's the big reveal. 

The Girl and one of her BFF's before the boys arrived.

And she and the boy from Boise. He reminds me a little of Ollie....

Homecoming Fix-its

Don't ask me why the local high school has Homecoming so early in the year, but here it was the second week of school and Homecoming loomed. 

This was her response to the "Don't Leave Me Hanging....Say you'll go to Homecoming" that appeared on a hanger on the door. The invite was actually issued long distance from a boy in Boise who is the son of DH's best hunting buddy. He attends a charter school there and they don't have school dances. They both went on the Wind River horsey pack in trip and apparently there has been some texting and phone calling since then.

We had ordered a dress, which arrived in time, but as usual, nothing is ever easy. It had some fit problems and it was up to me to fix them. I am by no means an alterations expert, so things were a little iffy, but I got the job done and we tried the dress on. The Girl seemed satisfied with it, but had to take a picture with my phone and send it to all her friends before the final OK was given. I'm not sure what she thought was going to happen if they hadn't thought it looked fine. *eyeroll*