This & That

Thanksgiving....the Day

We eat our big meal fairly early in the day, my reasoning being that if we eat relatively early in the afternoon, then by the time everyone is hungry again, we can eat pie for "dinner" and I don't lose half my leftovers the same day I cook them. It might not make a whole lot of sense, but it's the way it happens at my house.

We start the day with my husband cutting short his morning of duck hunting to come do a little dance with the turkey. He helps me get it stuffed and in the oven, nice guy that he is.

This is what the table looked like this year. Unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of everyone around it. I always get to the end of the day and realize I've forgotten some of the moments I wanted to photograph, darn it.

We got some snow this Thanksgiving. Usually we who have lived here for a while are pretty skeptical of any kind of precipitation in the forecast because often it will float off to the north or south and bypass us entirely. This time, however, the weather people were dead on and we ended up with about 6". 

This was the pie array. It was a joint effort and we ended up with Caramel Apple, Pumpkin, Pecan, Shoofly and Cherry. If you can't find something to eat in that lineup, well that's just very sad.

I got this picture from Eric's family of their Thanksgiving. I need to check back in and see if Caroline ate that whole turkey leg.

We Did Eat

I think there are reasons that there are traditional, tried and true recipes that appear on specific days and times of the year. 

It was definitely a pretty solid traditional Thanksgiving for us. We had Evan's family, Bryce, my mother and my in-laws in attendance. We had these pies, plus a few more. These are Caramel Apple Pie, which I think a majority of my boys would say is their favorite, and then the traditional Pumpkin Pie. We haven't grown pie pumpkins for several years and my husband misses it. We have plenty of leftovers, so Carcass Soup will be making its annual appearance....maybe even with the homemade noodles. For a change of pace we also had these sandwiches, which are easy, tasty and quick to put together.  There will be more turkey goodness in the coming week using up those leftovers. It's the only time of year I can really push my poultry luck and go several days without having to throw some red meat at my carnivore husband.

Around Here This Week

Around here this week we have had some Isaac withdrawal.

After 2 months of having him here, it seems almost deafeningly quiet, and a little lonesome. Unfortunately, getting home was not smooth sailing for his family. They were stranded in Denver because their connecting flight was coming from Chicago and apparently there was horrible weather there. 

My son ended up having to rent a car and had to make the 9 hour drive from Denver to his home the next day, but Isaac weathered it pretty well, all told.

While he was here, Isaac developed some routines, especially with regard to Ollie and breakfast. By the time Isaac was up for the day, I had usually let Ollie out and then brought him in for the day, so he was usually on his bed by where Isaac had breakfast. When he got home it bothered him that Ollie wasn't on his bed when he was eating, so his mom got creative. I'm not sure if it's still going on, but for a few days there had to be a makeshift "Ollie" by him for breakfast.

This was my view one morning this week. This picture is straight out of the camera...nothing altered.

There was some of this going on down at the ponds. This is my eldest and my brother-in-law, but it was repeated with Bryce and my father-in-law.

Thanksgiving happened here. There will be more about it in its own post, but here's a glimpse of a couple of the pies. Bryce actually put the filling together for the pumpkin pie and did a good job with that.

Since Thanksgiving (which happens to be my favorite holiday and never gets its due) is officially over, it's legit to turn on the Christmas lights.

Made a few cards this week. All of the designs came from this year's Kristina Werner Holiday Card series. This particular one is my take on Day 6. I mixed distress glitter in translucent embossing paste for the snowflakes since I didn't have the glitter paste shown.

My take on Day 8. Since I don't color people or critters, I improvised a scene with stamps and dies I had on hand.

What I did for Day 9. I made a shaker card like she did, but used a die to construct it rather than stamps and coloring. 

And for her "bonus" video. I used the cut out letters from one of last week's cards. 

From the kids and grandkids this week, Gwen had her first piano recital. She played "O Christmas Tree."

Collin's family set up their Christmas tree....behind a barricade which James would gladly go over, around or through if he could. I don't know if you can see it here, but he's on his very tippy-toes.

Bryce sent me this picture of him with a buddy. This is set up in the campus library for some reason.

And I got this picture of my daughter from the sister of my husband's hunting buddy. People are so nice to send me pictures of my girl, and if anyone is paying attention to the countdown besides me, we have 1 week and 6 days....13 days to go. 

A Turkey Day Retrospective

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope your day is filled with all the things you are thankful for. As for me, I am thankful for safety, health, food and shelter, and I'm especially grateful for my family and the love that holds us together. I don't have too many of them around my table this year, but I am grateful for them wherever they are. Since most of them are far away, I thought maybe a Thanksgiving Day retrospective was in order. Kind of fun since you can see them grow up in just a few pictures.

Or not....

 

It's interesting how things expand and contract over time. Have a wonderful day!

 

Air & Space And Things in Them

Collin wanted to go to the Air & Space museum on Veteran's Day. It was raining cats and dogs and the wind was blowing. Sort of felt like Idaho....only we don't usually get rain heavy enough to be animal-related.

 As an aside, it was really interesting to see how some of the local businesses near the base support the men and women in the armed forces. There were free meals offered at restaurants, and free admission to various museums, including this one. 

We found this place really interesting. I know my husband and FIL could have spent hours here.

They had little coin operated planes to ride. This was right before James bumped his lip on the wing there and wanted out.

Interestingly, they had a big display about football in one section of the museum. I got the impression that maybe it was a temporary exhibit. 

This flag was huge...hard to really capture that in a photo. There was also an exhibit about the Holocaust and even though I intellectually know about it, it's disturbing to me every time I'm reminded of it. Man's inhumanity to man is stunning and incomprehensible to me. 

That's why I'm glad there are crusader types like this guy.

 

As Promised....Cronuts and Fruit Bats

An unlikely combination to be sure, but the second day I was with Collin's family, he was off work and wanted to start the day with cronuts.

Now, if you're unfamiliar with this food craze, it's a cross between a croissant and a donut and there's a little bakery Collin likes that serves them. We picked out a variety to try...cinnamon sugar, vanilla sugar, white chocolate with chocolate sprinkles and peanut butter Nutella. They were all good, but the purist in me liked the vanilla sugar the best.

After our impromptu breakfast, we headed for the zoo. It was an overcast day and we saw a lot of critters, like these monkey guys.

...and these bird guys.

And did I mention the fruit bats? Creepy, nasty things.

They also have a big aquarium there and we said hello to this guy. "Duuuuuuuuude." (Name that movie...)

Then I tried the the silhouette technique which is kind of cool.

James loved seeing all the different fish.

He loved seeing everything, especially when he could run around.

This is a fairly yucky shot, but I love it anyway....my boy and his boy.

This guy is actually a little bit famous. If you saw the video clip that went viral on Facebook of the gorilla that took a run at a zoo window and cracked the glass, that's this guy...at this zoo. He and Collin had a little stare down.

We're Going to Park It...

Moving on in chronology, we're going to head out to the midwest where I visited with Collin's family.

 The first day I was there, Collin had to work, so my DIL and I ventured out to the park with James. 

He discovered that he likes the slide.

A lot. Tomorrow there are cronuts and fruit bats.

Chow This Week

It was cold this week. Pretty darn cold the whole week. My walking partner and I made the mistake of walking one morning in the wind that was blowing, thinking that since it was 44° outside, the wind would be tolerable. Big mistake. It was like walking uphill when we turned into the wind and the wind chill made it feel like 30°. Yeah, we checked when we got home.

So cold weather comfort food was in order. There was some "Beef" Stew and cornbread, burrito pie with Marc's Guac and Orange Bran Muffins. At the time I'm typing this, I have a couple of new recipes scheduled to try and they will appear here if they are worthy.

The real star of this week's food adventures is this book that I stumbled upon in some blog reading I've done lately. My DIL wanted cheesecake for her birthday and I found a recipe in here for "Foolproof New York Style Cheesecake." It is time-consuming, and in fact if I were to do this again, I'd start the day before, but the results are really tasty. I also made some raspberry sauce for the cheesecake and the recipe for that also came from this book. It's huge and thick and a really good reference source, if you're looking. 

The cheesecake turned out well despite a questionable bit of direction from the recipe. It calls for taking the baked cheesecake and putting it in a 500° oven for 12 minutes to brown the top some. This is what is looked like after 6 minutes. Yeah....I know.

But fortunately I had made that raspberry sauce, which made great camouflage for the top, and it ended up tasting just fine.

Around Here This Week

Around here this week things in the garden are well and truly dead.

We finally had several days in a row of good, hard frost and we are done for the year. Now we'll see how long it takes us to get things cleaned out.

The applesauce is put away in the storage room. As hard and long and messy as it is, I love seeing the bottles all lined up.

While that job was going on, I was doing laundry as well. Isaac loves it when I wash my sheets, because he can recline on the blankets that are thrown off the end of the bed. He likes to have reclining parties, and invites everyone to recline with him.

I made a few cards this week, which was fun. The designs are either from an Online Card Class or Kristina Werner's Holiday Card Series for this year. It's hard to see, but there is some translucent embossing paste over a snowflake stencil on this one.

I tried a couple of different color combinations of distress ink and ribbon/twine on these two. Shaker cards are still showing up all over the place.

I like how these turned out. The one on the left has a watercolor background and the one on the right has snowflakes die cut into the background. These were a little fiddly, though, and it took a while to get them to work just right.

As previously posted, it was our anniversary this week and my husband always has some roses sent. These are really that color....almost neon. 

My husband went duck hunting and took Isaac out with him when he cleaned the ducks. Grandpa, chocolate, Ollie and outside...not much more a nearly 2 year old boy can want.

Frederick found a pretty big leaf in the pile the boys were playing in.

There was a day this week that James didn't get a nap. It was a sad thing.

Marc's family left today. In fact, if you are reading this in the morning, I'm somewhere between home and Boise doing an airport run. This was another of the pictures I took this week of their family. Loved the hands up by Isaac's face for some reason. My husband and I miss them. The story behind this photo shoot was that we kind of left it until the last couple of days they were here, and it turned out that Marc could only come home for lunch on one of the days. It happened to be freezing, with the wind blowing, so we stayed right by the front door where it was a little sheltered and took 8 or 9 pictures and were done. We were lucky to get some that were really good.

What I got from the kids this week...Bryce checked in with a weather report from campus. Their first snow. I think he's excited to come home for Thanksgiving next week.

And my daughter sent this picture taken in front of a stadium. The official countdown stands at 2 weeks and 6 days. Not that I'm obsessing or anything.

 

It All Started With a Kit Kat Bar...

The Red Maple tree decided to dump all its leaves at once, which is a pretty normal thing for it to do.

 

I'd been wanting to get the leaves into a big pile for the grandkids to play in, and the day before Eric's family left seemed to be the perfect day.

The tiny kids were mostly unsure about the whole leaf thing, but Emmett was willing to give it a try as long has he had chocolate in his hand. 

The girls were all over it, though....

...and were OK with almost being totally buried. This was where Emmett drew the line. He was done.

Isaac did not want to have anything to do with those weird, crunchy leaves.

That is, until his dad showed him how he could grab handfuls and throw them up in air while saying, "Whee!"

And his dad burrowed under the leaf pile to play peek-a-boo with him.

Even Ollie did his part, but I'm not so sure he totally got into the spirit of things.

This was also the day we harvested the potatoes. Maybe you remember that we planted a long row the whole width of the garden....then again maybe not. Half of the row was red potatoes and half was russets. 

The reds did much better for some reason.

I'm not sure why, but the russets are mostly really small....think those packages of gourmet tiny potatoes small, and we didn't get as many of them. That will be fine...we'll use them, but I had it in my mind that we might get some nice, big bakers. Nope. Any potato advice would be appreciated for next year. I'm going to try some heavy hay mulch at the top of the garden next year to hopefully keep the weeds down.