Happy Halloween!

Moving and making

We are very busy moving to our new home and making a Halloween costume. We are also sadly lacking a computer and/or Internet service. Posting will be light while we get everything in order.

xoxo

Halloween

My creative little Rosemary was looking at picture of Halloween costumes on the internet with me and decided that she wanted to be a grocery bag. I am sure if I had given her the option of being a princess, she would have held on to that and not turned back. However, she is a princess almost every waking moment of every single day, so I was wanting to encourage her in a different direction. I thought maybe she could be a cupcake, but the kid WANTS TO BE A GROCERY BAG.

I'm actually quite proud of her.

So, I've been winging it on a grocery bag. I made one out of felt and I'll post pictures soon. I've also been making a bunch of felt vegetables to fill the grocery bag. I tried to find free patterns on the internet, and I did find some good ones. However, I did have to buy some patterns from Umecrafts on Etsy.

So far I have made a tomato, a squash, and a bunch of strawberries. I'll post more details soon.

Pannekoeken! (With Apples, of Course.)

Years and years and years ago, my older brother brought a Pannekoeken recipe home from his 8th grade home economics class. Ever since, this recipe has been a staple in our home. I actually prefer the recipe plain, without any fruit. But every once in awhile ... when I'm feeling really adventurous, I'll add diced apples to the mix.

Over the years, Joel has tried to improve the recipe by adding sugars or different fruit varieties, or what-have-you. In my humble opinion, he has never actually improved it.

Here's the recipe:

Pannekoeken!

3 eggs
3/4 c. flour
3/4 c. milk
3 T butter

Preheat the oven at 450 degrees.

Mix the eggs, flour, and milk. This is also where you would add apples, or what-have-you.

Melt the butter and pour into glass pie dish (or whatever works for you), making sure the butter coats the dish. Then pour the pannekoeken mix over the butter.

Cook for 15-20 minutes. Pannekoeken should be golden brown on top.

Enjoy with syrup, jam, powdered sugar, etc.

Coming Up Apples ...

Apples, apples, apples. Boy, do we have apples. Frozen apples, whole apples, sliced apples, apples still on the tree. Apples.

The lovely Sarah gave me a recipe for apple scones and I gave it a try. I was a bit nervous because I had never made scones and I know scones are either one of two things: good or not good.

These were good. I would venture to say they were perfect. Here is the recipe:

Apple Cream Scones*

2 c. flour
1 T baking powder
1 T sugar
1/2 t. salt
3/4 c. butter, chilled and cut into 1" pieces
1/4 c. milk (I used skim)
1/4 c. sour cream (I used non-fat)
1 t. vanilla
2 eggs

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

If you have a food processor, pulse flour, powder, sugar, and salt in it. I do not have a food processor, and I just mixed it in a standing mixer. Add butter and pulse (or mix) until pea-sized.

In a separate bowl, whisk together milk, sour cream, eggs, and vanilla. Pour over flour mixture until just combined.

Turn mixture out onto a parchment-lined baking sheet, form into an 8-inch circle that is 1-inch thick. Cut circle into 8 even pieces. Brush the tops with milk and sprinkle with 1-2 T cinnamon/sugar mixture (if you are just doing cream scones, sprinkle with plain sugar).

Bake for 20-25 minutes, until bottom of scones are golden brown.

*Feel free to remove the apples and just have cream scones, or replace the apples with another fruit. I've eaten them before with peaches.

I should also mention that this was a surprisingly easy recipe to make. So easy, in fact, that I made 3 batches and put 2 in the freezer. I hope they taste as good after they've been frozen!


p.s. More apple recipes to come ...

Spaghetti Squash

Our Minnesota vegetable garden is coming to its end. I am still processing it, but we have actually had our first frost...s. That's my dramatic way of making the word "frost" plural.

We had a lot of good crops, though sadly, the squash was not among them. While wee planted 3 different varieties, only the spaghetti squash grew. Two of them were harvested and we had the first one for dinner on Sunday night.

This squash was deliciously sweet and full of flavor.

Squash is one of the foods I have had to work hard to like. I never liked it growing up, but as I grew older the vegetable grew more enticing. Joel and I have experimented with many different recipes and ingredients and have found the best ingredient to add if your squash isn't tasting so great is brown sugar. When I give squash to Rosemary I add so much brown sugar that it tastes like candy. I would rather have a fattening vegetable than no vegetable at all.

Brown sugar with spaghetti squash, however, is not so good. Joel and I actually wrote spaghetti squash off for many years, though it was admittedly more because of the texture than the taste. Then, a few years ago, my mom informed me that spaghetti squash is best when eaten like ... wait for it ... spaghetti.

I know it's called spaghetti squash, but for some bizarre reason, this idea was absolutely genius to me. And now, this squash is among my favorites.

I didn't follow an actual recipe, but it's pretty simple. Here's what I did.

Heat the oven to 400. Cut the squash in half and scoop out all the squashy/seedy stuff. Place face down on a cookie sheet and cook roughly a half hour until the tops are brown.

I had turkey bratwurst on hand, so I cooked them up and heated up some store-bought spaghetti sauce. I scooped out the squash, sliced up the bratwurst, and topped it with the sauce and some Parmesan cheese. It was so good that even my picky little Rosemary gobbled it down!

He lives on Drury Lane

In college I worked at one of the best coffee houses I've been in to date. It was actually a bit of a downfall because they made a lot of really fattening food ... and I ate a lot of it. Fortunately it was the kind of town where I didn't need to use my car, and I walked and rode my bike as much as possible. I actually never once purchased a parking permit for the school parking lot; even in the bitter cold or rain, I would walk. Oh, the good old days.

Wait, that's not what I'm here to write about!

Well, if I haven't mentioned it, we have an apple tree in our yard. Our landlady did not expect it to produce fruit this year, but it did and boy was it good! We are drowning in some of the most delicious apples I have ever tasted. So, it only seemed right to pull out the trusty recipe that has been adapted from the recipe that was used at the aforementioned coffeehouse.

Today I made them with apples, but they are delicious with a variety of fruits. For Rosemary's birthday in April, I made them with fresh strawberries and they were some of the best muffins I have ever had. I still have some in the freezer and am saving them for a special occasion.

Delicious Fruited Muffins

4 1/3 cups flour
2 t. baking powder
2 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
2 t. cinnamon
2.5 cups buttermilk
1 1/2 cups canola oil*
2 eggs
4 t. vanilla
1 c. sugar
3 c. fruit and/or chocolate**

1. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon in a large bowl and mix together with a whisk.
2. Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients.
3. Combine oil, buttermilk, vanilla, sugar, and eggs in a liquid pitcher. Whisk liquid ingredients together and pour over dry ingredients.
4. Mix wet ingredients into the dry ingredients with a spatula. DO NOT OVER MIX!
5. Add fruit, etc. right before batter is completely combined and stir in lightly.
6. Scoop batter into greased muffin tin and sprinkle tops with sugar (I used a cinnamon/sugar mix to go with the apples).
7. Bake until edges are golden brown , the tops are light brown, and the muffins are not doughy.
8. Bake at 375 degrees for 12-20 minutes.


* I made this with 3/4 cup applesauce and 3/4 cup canola oil, and while they were still good ... they weren't as good.

**I added nearly 4 cups of apples and feel like it would be better with more. I also wonder if I diced the apples too small.

Everything in the right time.

A little while ago I wrote a post about The Longing and what I can, can't, should, or shouldn't try to control. And while that post can and did relate to so many things in my life, it was our present location in a rambler in the woods that brought it all on.

I knew that moving from our East St. Paul bungalow to (1) a 'modern home' (2) a rental (3) in the country (4) far away from conveniences I have had most of my life (5) in central Minnesota was going to be a huge adjustment. Both Joel and I tried very hard to embrace it and to an extent we did. We gardened, we explored, we rode our bikes. We definitely appreciated the apple and plum tree. However the driving and the bugs made it very difficult. By the end of the summer we all had cabin fever from being stuck inside. The bugs were that bad.

So we spent a good amount of summer flirting with moving. We looked at houses and apartments for rent and ended up very disappointed. We tried a lot of things, ads on craigslist, word-of-mouth, etc. and it just felt like moving wasn't meant to be. Everything was either too expensive, too disgusting, or would not allow our dog. We both felt very strongly that we just needed to make lemonade out of our lemon-house and stay here.

And then the right place basically fell on our heads. The lower-level of a duplex, inexpensive, perfect neighborhood, etc. It's smaller, much smaller, and has virtually no storage place. But we think it will do quite nicely. Notice has been given, plans have been made, and October will be our last month in the deep country.

Farewell mosquitoes and howling wolves, we look forward to visiting with you again someday, but hopefully that will mean we're on vacation!

I could not agree with this more!

Thanks, Mollie!

Tomato Fail

It seemed slow-roasting almost all of our tomatoes was not such a good idea. I had dreams of winter stews and chili.

The recipe said to put it in the oven at 250; I put it in the oven at 200 since our oven runs warm. It then said to roast for 9 hours. I checked it after 4 hours, then took Rosemary off to her swim lesson.

When we returned (a total of 7 hours for the tomatoes), this is what we found. The tomatoes were almost completely ash. Joel commented that cracking through the skins was like cracking through the crust on creme brulee.

These tomatoes were so burnt, so stuck to the pan that I threw everything away, pan and all.

Perhaps I'll try again next year.