This & That

Smoke in the Willows

First off, this boy is celebrating his first birthday today!

Happy birthday to Emmett, who loves peaches. :)

The most recent trip to the cabin....we were hoping to get up above the smoke from all the fires in the northwest, but we weren't that lucky.

The smoke oozed in and there was the faint hint of campfire smell in the air.

There was also a fire that started to burn about 10 miles away that added to the problem, but fortunately it was quickly put out.

We hauled up a couple of the horses so the guys could do a little exploring.

Ollie wasn't allowed to go along with them. Much to his dismay, he was stuck with me instead of roaming the wilderness with my husband. He was devastated. 

I took pity on him and the two of us went for a walk around the place. We passed the altar rock, where we'd left some corn shucks for the deer.

We also went by the river so he could swim a little. This was the little depression in the gravel where Roger's little rear sat when he was throwing rock into the river.

Believe it or not, we are already seeing traces of fall coming to the mountains.

The willows are already turning a bright yellow-gold color.

It won't be too long now when the wildflowers will totally disappear and fall will be here for good.

Pickle Relish

Doing up the pickle relish this week, means canning season has begun. We've definitely discussed in the past my love/hate relationship with canning. It's a bunch of work...I won't lie. However, there is a huge sense of satisfaction to "putting things by" for a winter day and this feeling is compounded when it involves things that I've actually grown myself, which is the case with the relish here. I didn't grow the green peppers because I'm not a huge fan, but the cucumbers and onions came out of the garden and I bought the green peppers at the local farm stand just down the street. We use this relish not only for hot dogs, which are a favorite lunch at the cabin, especially if there are grandchildren in attendance, but we also use it when making our own sandwich spread, which I do a lot with leftover salmon or roast. This recipe calls for the vegetables to be ground up and I do own one of these things to do the grinding, but a food processor works just as well, just don't pulverize them too much. I got the recipe from a friend when we were living in Minnesota during part of our schooling. That means I've been making this same recipe for over 25 years. I'm so old.

Sweet Pickle Relish

• 1 gallon (16 cups) ground cucumbers
• 4 green peppers, ground 
• 4 medium onions, ground
• 1/2 cup pickling salt (which can be found near regular salt in the grocery store)
• 2 cups white vinegar
• 6 cups sugar
• 3 teaspoons celery seed
• 1 Tablespoon mustard seed
• 1 teaspoon turmeric
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cloves

Sprinkle cucumber, peppers and onions with the salt and let stand for 1 hour. This draws some of the moisture out of the vegetables. Place vegetables in a fairly fine mesh strainer and rinse the salt off with cool water. Let drain.

Add vinegar, sugar and spices to vegetables in a large pan, Bring to a boil and let cook down for 15 minutes. Pour into clean jars and seal. Process 15 minutes in a boiling water bath.

Around Here This Week

Around here this week, I have been back and forth to Utah multiple times. In between times, I have desperately been trying to stay ahead of just the basic homemaking things as well as trying to cope with the garden harvest.

Bryce pulled the onions for me. It was a little past time for doing this, but we managed to get it done before he disappeared on me.

As is usual for our harvest, some of the onions are absolutely enormous. Seriously, some of them are bigger than grapefruits. 

I used some of the larger cucumbers and a couple of the larger onions to make a batch of relish. Canning season begins.

My daughter checked in with several interesting pictures. She said one of these horses tried to bite her. Some things are consistent no matter where you are.

She also said this storm prompted a public announcement over loudspeakers to seek shelter. She said she felt like she was in the Hunger Games. 

She also took a picture of this sign in front of a church not of our faith. Applicable on so many levels. :)

From the other kids and grandkids...My husband and I tended Evan's boys one evening this week. There were peach shakes involved, although the blender was pretty loud.

In the Back East there was some fishing...

...and frog catching, which Gwen enjoys quite a bit. Caroline was sick for several days, poor kiddo. Emmett is closing in on his first birthday, if you can believe it.

James has apparently found a new favorite toy.

Fried Cheerios make a breakfast of champions. At 10 months he is taking steps, several at a time.

Collin harvested some habanero peppers from the plant they are growing on their apartment deck. He's wanting to make some Habanero jelly. I told him to be sure to wear gloves and not touch his eyes when carving those babies up. 

I got this picture back. I guess when you don't have gloves, Ziploc bags will work in a pinch.

I also got this family photo. We will hopefully see DDIL #3 and the baby this week when she's in Utah for a visit.

The other major event from the week was taking Bryce down to BYU to start school. Would you believe I didn't take one picture of the whole process??? I'm not sure why not, but my emotional state might have had something to do with it. I did get this picture on my drive home. He is in the middle of trying to find his way around campus...a huge hurdle when one is visually compromised and the campus itself is immense. He did manage to find where he was supposed to audition for the Men's Chorus. He's made it past the first cut, but the whole process takes several days and several auditions. Baby steps.

 

It's WAR!!!

I have really missed Cleo and any other cat we've ever had this week. You have to understand that my husband is not a cat fan, but as long as we've had a cat living on the premises, we haven't had mice in the house.

Last Sunday morning I was working at my computer in the kitchen and saw a fat mouse run across the kitchen floor and under my stove. I hate mice and I have no problem with cats roaming around keeping them out of my house. I got these sticky traps and baited them hoping to catch the dang little mouse, but then I had a different problem. Three different times, Ollie sneaked over and ate the cheese off the sticky traps. We won the war in the end, but I'm now lobbying hard for a new cat or two. It's a hard sell for my husband, though. He's not sure what's worse....the mice or a cat.

Card Comparison

I didn't have a ton of time to prepare card kits for our sister days. I had finished camp, but there were still things to wrap up, Bryce was getting ready to leave for school, and we spent some time with family. So in order to simplify things, I went through my card stash and picked out cards I had already made with designs I liked. Why reinvent the wheel? I went through my papers and made kits basically copying myself. You will see both cards here. The left one is the card I copied. The right one is what we made during our time together. On some I ended up liking the first card, on some the other one and on some I liked them both. In any case, we had fun and put together some cards. :)

Sister Time

My sisters and I took our annual time together last week.

 We decided to go the other direction and met in Park City. Here, we wandered the streets a little bit and took a selfie.

 And there were our usual crafts. This was one we did. It's receipt tape attached to a board and has a magnetic backing so it can attach to the fridge for making lists. A great idea! Mine resides on the cabin fridge.

My other sister had this project for us. We stenciled and then we sanded and "weathered." So fun and I'm excited to put it on my doorstep this fall.

I did some cards which I will show in tomorrow's post. It's always great to get together and spend some time. We don't get to do it often enough. Love these awesome women!

 

Miscellaneous Manly Things

Of course, when there's a group of guys together at the cabin, there are various manly things that take place.

 Putting this stuffed dead thing up on this log at was one of them, recently.

You can see that it took a bit of doing. There were ladders involved, and the Velvet Elvis fish looked on. The Velvet Elvis fish? Oh, there's a story there. It starts with my husband going fishing for marlin and actually catching one. Did you know that stuffed fish are actually not fish at all? Nope, you can pay someone a very nice chunk of change to paint a fiberglass model that looks exactly nothing like the fish you actually caught. When you get your technicolor fish back, you can take one look at it and relegate it to the darkest corner of the cabin, where your grandchildren will call it a whale, and your wife will make snide comments about getting a copy of the famous dogs playing poker picture to pair it with.

Moving on.....there is what my husband calls "glassing the hillside," which means looking for critters through various magnification instruments. Because you are outdoorsy men, after all, and it's just what you do.

You also share your pancakes, bird-like, with grandkids who might discover they're still hungry after getting out of their chairs.

And real men in this family take charge of feeding the critters around the place. It turns out that Ollie likes pancakes, too.

The Rock Toss

 You might not know it, but there's plenty to keep little boys amused by the river, even when they're not fishing.

Mostly it involves sticks...

...and rocks.

Lots and lots of rocks.

And a firm hand gripping an article of clothing, so they don't inadvertently go swimming.

 Just one flower photo in the middle of the rock throwing. :)

All the grandchildren enjoy throwing rocks in the river, and they've reached just the right age to realize that the bigger the rock they throw, the more chance they have of splashing their brother. As an aside, I've always been amazed that little kids can sit balanced like this, all squatted down. My boys used to sit this way, too, and I could never figure out how they could stand it. My husband tells me that this is a very common position in Asian culture.

Look how far over Roger is bending to go after rocks to throw.

He was fairly surprised when some of those rocks splashed him in the face when he threw them. You can see here that reaching as far as he can, he's ended up with with his feet mostly in the water. When we got these boys back to the cabin, most of their clothes went into the dryer for a while.

 

If you want rapid-fire rock throwing, it helps to have a handy grandpa to keep you supplied with ammo.

Summertime Beef Marinade

I've had this recipe for a long time. When I had all the kids at home, I would unwrap several packages of "steak" and make multiples of this marinade for freezer meals. The original recipe is for kabobs, but since I find them to be too much trouble, usually, I just use the marinade for steak. The recipe comes from the Creme de Colorado cookbook and, no, I don't have a picture. I left to go to a wedding shower while the guys were grilling it and came home to.....nothing. It's just that good, people.

Summertime Beef Marinade

• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1/4 cup oil (the original recipe calls for much more than this, but it's just fine with this amount, so that's what I use)
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
• 1/4 cup Dijon mustard
• 1 cup fresh lemon juice
• 1-2 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
• Steak or "steak" for marinating

Combine all ingredients in a gallon zip-top bag and marinate for several hours. Discard marinade and grill steaks to desired doneness.

Around Here This Week

 Around here this week, the west has been on fire....in the most literal sense. 

We have been really lucky that there haven't been any near us here or at the cabin. If you remember, we had a close call a couple of years ago. I'm not sure you can get the full effect in this picture, but for the past week, we've had this grayish smokey film down low, blocking out our usual views of the mountains in the distance.

The air has smelled vaguely of campfire, which I don't really mind if I'm sitting next to an actual campfire, but not if I have to breathe it all the time. We'll all be glad when they can get the fires under control, but fire season here goes until the middle of October, so it might not be any time soon. That said, the smoke in the air makes for very dramatic sunset pictures. For some reason when I try to take pictures of them, the sun still appears yellow, instead of the solid red it actually is. In this photo, the sun is actually the same color as the ring around it.

We have been enjoying the zucchini harvest. We had a bout with squash bugs early on, but nothing recently. I used a couple of torpedoes to grate up for zucchini treats during the winter. These bags will go into the freezer.

My husband got it into his head that he wanted to make some strawberry rhubarb jam. I was busy with another project, so he talked Evan and Jan into coming over and helping.

OK, so is it wrong of me to admit that I was really surprised that they pulled it off without my help?? I was only called in on a couple of consults....and that's exactly what Evan called them. I'm thinking that soon they should be able to do all the canning, right? RIGHT???

From the kids and grandkids this week, I got this picture of Roger who apparently does a really good job of drinking yogurt with a straw. 

 Emmett is upright and starting to walk around with this push-toy.

Marc sent me this picture of Isaac. Now this is very much a "Marc" face. He definitely has the look of his daddy in this expression.

My daughter checked in with this series of pictures. I'm not exactly sure where they were...maybe the zoo, because I know they did go there recently.

These totally cracked me up, and made me miss her all at the same time. We have a mid-December release date for her and I will admit that I can hardly wait to get her home again.