This & That

The Golden Hour With the Boys

We had everyone at Sunday dinner this past week, when my son, Evan, pointed out how my neighbor's ash trees looked in the late afternoon light.

These are the same trees that were just barely starting to turn about 10 days ago.

My husband was getting ready to water the pasture and apparently there is a random pumpkin vine down in the very end of the pasture where I never venture voluntarily. 

He got Isaac back under the pasture fence.

Then Roger started rolling the pumpkins down the slight incline back towards the pasture.

I caught this one, single picture of Isaac holding still. He was off again as soon as I took it.

He got Grandpa to push him on the swing. He loves to swing.

Marc got a hold of one of the pumpkins....

...and posed for one brief second, like his boy. And then....

 

Watching the Changes

Just a few images from an overnighter at the cabin last week.

The willow leaves have fallen off, leaving the interesting colored branches behind.

The wildflowers are drying.

Other leaves are changing as well.

I'm always amazed by just how blue the sky is up there. Probably only about 6 weeks that we'll be able to drive in this year.

Habanero Gold Pepper Jelly

I've had a couple of requests to post the recipe for this jelly that I made last week. It comes from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. I chopped up all the vegetables in my food processor and the only thing I would do differently is to try to do that with the dried apricots as well to make everything uniform in size. Marc has tried it with dried mango and liked it. I did NOT use the Habanero seeds in my jelly because I'm pretty much a wimp with really spicy foods. It was plenty hot enough for me without them. The jelly looks really beautiful in the jars. :)

 

Habanero Gold Jelly

1/3 cup finely sliced dried apricots
3/4 cup white vinegar
1/4 up finely diced red onion
1/4 cup finely diced sweet red pepper
1/4 cup finely diced habanero peppers, including seeds
OR 1/4 cup diced, combined jalapeno and Scotch Bonnet peppers
3 cups granulated sugar
1 pouch Certo liquid pectin

Cut apricots into 1/8 inch slices. Measure into a large deep stainless steel saucepan with vinegar; let stand 4 hours. Individually, cut onion and seeded peppers into 1/8 inch slices; cut slices into 1/4 inch dice. Measure each ingredient; add to apricots. Stir in sugar.

Over high heat, bring to a full roiling boil. Stirring constantly, boil hard 1 minute. Remove from heat. Immediately stir in pectin, mixing well. Boil hard for 1 minute. Remove from heat and quickly skim foam.
Pour jelly into hot jars, dividing solids equally among jars and filling each jar to within 1/4 inch of top rim. Wipe rims. Apply lids.

Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath. Cool upright, until lids pop down, about 30 minutes.

Yield: 3 half pints

Around Here This Week

Happy birthday to my baby brother!!

So around here this week, this is happening:

This is our little Golden Delicious apple tree. We planted it a few years ago and have gotten half a dozen apples off it. This seems like a bumper crop. We'll wait until they get just a touch of frost and then pick them. We picked the Granny Smith's and the Macintosh this week because they were starting to fall off the tree. We also dug a few of the red potatoes for dinner one evening. We need to finish digging the row, but we got an ice cream bucket from just one of the plants.

Filing under the category of "You've Got to Be Kidding Me" there's this. Yeah. HELLO, it's FALL! Did you not get the memo???

I did a couple of layouts this week with Ali Edwards' Black & White kit. This one documents how my husband and I are about as opposite as 2 people can get.

This one documents my daughter's recent bout with Hand, Foot and Mouth disease. A couple of the pictures of her peeling skin are a little gross, but her comment to me when she sent them was, "Well, I guess it needs to be documented, right?" A true scrapbooker's child. 

From the kids and grandkids this week, it was Evan's birthday this week and we were invited for ice cream cake.

 

Roger enjoyed his ice cream cake, right down to the last drop.  

Collin's family has some bike trails near where they are living and took a ride with James this week. My DIL tells me he's not too fond of the helmet.

For Talk Like A Pirate Day last week, they all got dressed up and headed to Krispy Kreme for the free donuts. Love the bird on Collin's shoulder and note that James has a hook.

I got this picture from DDIL #4 of Isaac. A good share of my week has been spent getting the house into shape for their family to come see us today. They will be with us for 2 months while Marc does some school rotations here in town. Can't wait to see them!

Bryce's contribution was texting me this picture. Can you tell what it is? It's a left-handed spiral notebook. Boom. That's what I'm talkin' about. His comment was "I know. Here at BYU we support people of varying hand persuasions." I want to know where these were when I was at BYU.

And finally, my daughter's peeling feet. Sorry. At least she's finally feeling better, but can you imagine? Her hands did the same thing.

 

The Guinea Pig

My eldest has a birthday today.

As with any of my children's birthdays, I always think to myself, "How could that much time have passed?" This is mostly true with my eldest because, well....he's my eldest and the one that started us on this wild ride of parenthood. (On his blessing day. The blanket he's lying on was made for me when I was a baby by a good friend of my Grandmother Good.)

So 34 years ago, as of about 7:30 this morning, this guy came into the world. (The day his braces came off.)

He's a good kid, and I don't think he'll ever be old enough that I don't think of him as my kid. (College--Men's Chorus)

He's a very focused, hard worker and his dad and I are very grateful for that. We never really had to nag him to do that stuff that he was self-motivated about, which included school work of any kind.

Digging post holes when he was a teenager? Weeeeeeeelllllll......

Happy birthday to my Evan, my first, my eldest, and the Guinea Pig (sorry!)! I love you!

Trying to Keep Up

With the exception of the cucumbers, which seem to have inexplicably given up the ghost, the garden is in over drive. Perhaps it senses that it has only a limited amount of time before the frost comes but wow....

Here is a picture of what has been picked recently. The chilies sitting on the wood stove were the ones I turned into the chili rellenos. I think there's over a bushel of tomatoes there, some of which got turned into salsa this past weekend.

The peppers of all kinds have outdone themselves. Take a look at the size of this jalapeño. It's literally almost as big as my hand. 

Food for The Week

It has been a bit of an interesting week food-wise. It was filled with lots of canning that you've seen pictures of yesterday. It's just that time of year...setting food by for the cold weather. 

If you can stand yet another canning picture, here is some pepper jelly I did this week with some habanero peppers from the garden. I'm not a big fan of rip-your-head-off spicy foods, so it might seem odd for me to make this, but a couple of my sons and their wives have made it and given it as holiday gifts, and I'm thinking that's what will happen with some of this. My husband likes to have his head ripped off occasionally with really spicy things, so he will enjoy this. It's pretty, too. 

My husband has been gone, so I haven't done much cooking other that what was necessary to can whatever I did. I did put together three Chili Relleno casseroles for the freezer, but mostly I've enjoyed fresh tomato sandwiches with some of the big Beefmaster tomatoes. Simple, but really, really good. 

 

Around Here This Week

Around here this week I noticed this when I came home from my daily morning walk...

and I can't tell you how happy it makes me. These big ash trees in my neighbor's pasture are always the first ones to start turning. 

Just like this picture...the one yellow birch leaf.

This happened, and I'm not done with this process yet. I still have another box of peaches to do at some point.

So did this...Chili Relleno casseroles with the Anaheim peppers. I will tell you that it is becoming a challenge to keep up with the garden produce. I have something like a bushel and a half of tomatoes off my plants that I need to do something with. I think more salsa will happen today, and maybe a half a recipe of ketchup at some point, much as the thought does not thrill me. Since the ketchup is my husband's request, I'm hoping he'll feel up to juicing those for me. There are still more tomatoes on the plants and I have absolutely no idea what I will do with them.

We have had a wonderfully cool few days this week, complete with some rain. This was the view I had one afternoon. However, you'll notice that it's sunny at my house. Even though that cloud looks very threatening, I didn't see anything from it. That photo is totally unedited, too. It was just that black.

I got a layout done. This is a tweaked take on an Ali Edwards layout, from her "Build" story kit. This was Isaac's blessing day. He's sure grown since then. The reason I post this so small is that Typepad automatically cuts off a little of one side of my "large" sized pictures. You can click on it and make it a little bigger if you like.

Since my husband was off chasing critters this week, I had some time to not only do the layout, but to work on some cards as well. I pulled out an older Simon Says Stamp card kit and did multiples of some of these card designs.

The designs themselves either came from the example sheet with the kit or sketches from old Paper Craft magazines.

From the kids and grandkids this week, Marc's family spent some time over the weekend. Fun stuff.

Isaac is trying out some new yoga moves.

And my daughter checked in with this picture from the ER, where she finally got that right diagnosis of Hand, Foot and Mouth disease. She says that now she can finally get her shoes back on her feet, which were swollen to twice their normal size, and the feeling is starting to come back to her fingers, which are grossly peeling. She did send me a picture of her fingers which I will not post here because it was really painful looking, poor girl. She and I are both so glad she's doing better.

Husband-1, Chipmunk-0

We had a little excitement at the cabin during our stay. We had a little visitor of the furry variety inside the cabin. Apparently a chipmunk slipped in at some point when the door was open. 

There was moving of appliances when he hid behind the dryer. We tried the kinder, gentler way of baiting him out with some pistachios and a free and clear passage to the outside, but he was not buying it, and this was even after he'd pooped on all the clean laundry stacked in there. That's my eldest son there on the ground trying to figure out where the little beast was, exactly. 

He made a dash for the storage room and hid behind boxes, at which point we emptied the floor in there and tried to get Ollie to herd him out. It was like an episode of "I Love Lucy" with the critter trying to climb up my husband's arm at one point, but in the end we won and he ended up outside. New cabin rule....the door is always shut.

If You Have Little Boys at the Cabin...

If you have little boys at the cabin, you think a campfire will be a fun activity.

If you start the campfire, you are going to enjoy the warmth and get a little hypnotized watching the flames.

And if you're going to have a campfire, you're going to want some marshmallows to roast.

And if you're going to have some marshmallows to roast, you are going to want to attempt the challenge stick and try to perfectly roast 5 of them at once.

And if you get 5 of them roasted at once, you're going to want to make s'mores.

If you make s'mores, you're going to watch the boys enjoy marshmallow-y goodness.

And if the boys enjoy the marshmallow-y goodness, they might want to try it right off the stick without any adornments whatsoever.

Our evening as a Laura Numeroff book. :)