Thanksgiving 2011

Here are some photos from our Thankgiving visit from Grandma and Grandpa Ecker. They drove all the way from Arizona, braving the Kansas winds as the cold weather was finally rolling in.

Grandma is a patient cook and let Piper and Graci help with the pies. Piper is making her own "pie." She decorated and cooked it with cinnamon and sugar on top.

Daddy and Grandpa thought teaching the girls how to play Uno would be a great way to pass the time. They were right! There is nothing the girls would rather do now. Television, computers? No, thanks, break out the Uno cards!

I think Graci is trying to signal something to Grandpa. She likes to play on her own now.

Poor Grandma was so cold! We kicked the heat up a couple notches for her and she felt much better.

Cuddle time! Don't mind the possessed dog.

Our extra hour

Here's what we did with our extra time Sunday morning after "falling back" an hour. We tried keeping the kids up late, but Graci woke up at her usual time, though now an hour earlier. I took advantage of it by snapping some photos of the girls before church. Peter's mom made the dresses...I could do ten posts of Nona dresses!

Randomness

Randomness, isn't that what blogs are supposed to be? I really keep a blog for my family members that are oh-so far away since we live out here in the farm country now, but it is nice that it doubles as a photo album and journal, too. Here are some slightly odd happenings inspired by the photos I took and wanted to share, but not create post after post after post after, you get the idea.

I am calling this the Dobby tomato. It really freaked me out the first time I picked it up. If you have never read Harry Potter, sorry, you won't get the joke!

Dorothy and Toto downtown at Oztoberfest.

One of the seven matching glasses I picked up at at garage sale for 50 cents.

I really should have done an entire post devoted to caterpillars because we had thousands, yes, thousands of them on our property this year. Graci was easily entertained for two months straight. Those of you who know how large my hands are will appreciate the size of this hefty caterpillar. Weird thing was we had no caterpillars last year!

Yeah, my husband loves nature.

And as you can see, nature loves him.

Aloha, Chicken!

Of course, when I say, "Aloha," it can only have one meaning when it comes to barbecue and that is, "Good-bye!" Unless you count how amazing Peter's Hawaiian chicken tasted, then it would mean "love." Peter and his friend from work, Evan, entered their Hawaiian chicken in a contest/fundraiser for the United Way put on by the Manhattan Public Works department. Hmm, well, I guess technically it was smoked chicken, as you can see from this photo. Evan is from the country and builds his own smokers. This one tilted for transport, although Evan is blocking the view of the trailer. Don't mention the historical inaccuracies of the name "HMS Ironsides" to Evan, though. He likes to think of this smoker as finished. ;)

Peter is removing the smoked pineapple from one of the many teired racks inside the smoker.

Is that my knife? And my card table? Heh, heh.

The real judges. Oh, and Evan made bacon candy. The name says it all! Mmmmm!

The Great Pumpkin Undertaking

Recently I have discovered the very satisfying and slightly addictive process of home canning. There is just something empowering about growing your own wholesome, organic food and being able to enjoy it all year long. It puts me at ease to know where my food has come from and also that I can make such wonderful treats for a fraction of the cost of purchasing them at the grocery store. I started with tomatoes from our garden (we finally had a tomato harvest thanks to an extra warm late September and October). I also have the wonderful luxury of living next door to someone that has their own produce stand. He was selling pie pumpkins for a dollar and I told myself if he marked them down, I would brave the pumpkin canning adventure. Well, the next time I went they were 80 cents each and I couldn't pass it up. There are just too many pumpkin lovers in this house!

I looked up some info online and in my canning book about canning pumpkin. Apparently the USDA does not recommend canning pumpkin puree because of the density of the mixture and the length of time it takes to ensure the contents have been properly heated through to kill all bacteria and thus be preserved safely. Well, I really don't like being told that I should just buy something from the store that I can make myself, so I continued to research with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. (I have a lot of thoughts about the USDA, but that is for another post). I decided not to can straight-up pumpkin puree, but to do a pie filling. This required a ton of sugar, so that put me at ease since it was my first time canning pumpkin and the sugar can act as a preservative. Here is a little photo journey of my day-long project!

My first batch of pumpkins await their turn at the chopping block. I sliced them in half all the way up to the stem and then just pulled the pumpkins apart since the stem is very difficult to cut. Then I scooped out the seeds and pulp and put it in a bowl to be separated later.

I was able to do two batches of six pumpkins each in my oven. Some of the pumpkins cooked faster than others, but that was fine because I could let them cool in small batches, scoop out the pumpkin, and wait for the others to finish cooking. This took about two hours, but I was busy most of the time and when I wasn't busy, I just found something else to do while I waited.

Here they are roasting!

Don't worry, everything was disinfected prior to this whole process. I love that we have a compost bin, because there was a lot to add that day.

Ahh, immersion blenders make life so easy. I really had a nice, smooth, somewhat professional looking product when I was done. 12 pumpkins gave me over 20 cups of puree, so I had to freeze 8 cups or so to leave room in my saucepan for the remaining pumpkin pie filling ingredients.

Took me a while to clean these, but they are so delicious! I'm trying to save some for my dad when he comes to visit over Thanksgiving, but they are hard to resist. I used a spice mixture of equal parts sugar and salt, and half as much chili powder to roast the seeds with.

The finished product. I ended up with 9 1/2 jars and only 7 would fit in the canner, so a couple of lucky people got to take some refrigerated pie filling home to try out. Peter used some in pumpkin muffins and we also used it as a spread. It is really heavy on spices, but that's what makes the flavor world go round, so bring 'em on! (ps, I did the hot water bath for 3 hours)

A Cute Piper Quote

Every week on Tuesday afternoons, Piper and Graci go to my friend, Shirley's house while I teach my Let's Play Music class. Shirley has four girls, so they are always excited to go and not so excited to return home. One afternoon when I was picking them up Shirley recounted a conversation she had with Piper to me. It went something like this:

Piper: "Shirley, do you know my daddy's name?"

Shirley: "I'm not sure, but I think it's Peter."

Piper: "Well, actually he has three names; Peter, Honey, and Peter Clark."

Cute.

Found!

Seriously, I am not using the computer again for a week after today. I found my photos. I went to some pc forums and discovered several people that are having the same problem I am! Whenever you edit or rotate a photo, it becomes a hidden file. So, once I figured out how to display hidden files, KABLAM! There were my old pics! Hooray! My brain is mush, though, I am not accustomed to spending so much time looking at a screen, so here are yet even more cute pictures from our trip to Little Munchkins. I'll have you know, I was making plans to drive down there again this Saturday, pay another $12, and retake all my cute pics.

Graci insisted on the small pumpkin.

Piper was in the mood to pose, we have three more pics like this.

Love this train, what an inventive idea!

Photo Recovery

Thanks to my technologically amazing brother-in-law, Mike, I was able to recover a couple of my photos. Most of them are still hiding from me, but I will keep trouble-shooting because they were just so darn cute.

Pumpkin Patch

I am not downplaying the cuteness of these pictures, but I had many more cute pictures, thought they were on my computer, deleted them off my camera, went back to my computer and they were gone. There really should be a support group out there for this kind of loss because it hit me really hard, harder than I thought, I cried, for goodness sake!

I love these girls and we had a blast at the pumpkin patch. The day was just perfect (especially for taking pictures, but I am done writing about it, really). We were there for two hours and the girls wanted to stay longer. Next time I will pack a lunch. They had a hay bale tower, a giant tree house, tube slide, zip line, several really cute picture stops (grumble), animals to pet, a train ride and of course oodles of pumpkins.

Flower Girl

Piper was asked to be the flower girl in a friend's wedding. She was very excited, especially after reading the Arthur book about how D.W. wants to be the flower girl, but her cousin gets to instead. At the rehearsal, I was busy playing the keyboard. I made a note of where I would be stopping the music and it ended perfectly, right before a nasty page turn (made nastier by the fact that I was singing and playing), and for you music people, where I could end on a PAC. Well, at the rehearsal, Piper only had the basket to pretend with. We had practiced at home and I showed her how to walk slowly and toss the petals to the ground, first on one side, then on the other. At the wedding I began the music and things proceeded as practiced, except when I reached the spot in the music I had previously planned on stopping, only a couple of the wedding party members had walked by. I looked over my shoulder and started chuckling (hard to play and sing when chuckling). There was Piper, moving at the speed of slug, meticulously taking exactly one flower petal out at a time and throwing it to the ground with enough force to stick a pitch fork straight up in the mud. If she got two flower petals, she stopped to make sure they were unstuck, picked her favorite, and hurled it to the ground. It was just too cute. I'm not sure how they got her moving. Maybe someone came up behind her. That's my Piper, though. She takes her jobs seriously!

Happy 4th Birthday, Piper

Oh, yes, there were other important events this summer, like Piper's birthday! I asked her what kind of cake she wanted (and didn't offer any complicated or creative suggestions) to which she replied, "I want a pink cake with purple frosting." Okay, then, no problem! I had to borrow some red food dye and found these gumdrops hidden in the cabinet. Not bad for random decorations. It met her expectations, so she was happy. We had a small celebration. Really, as long as there is cake, it's a fantastic party according to my children.

Piper's gift was a new big girl bed. She was proud and delighted an did not expect anything else. Come to think of it, since I am writing this a good three months late, she hasn't fallen off of her new bed once! Graci, on the other hand, has fallen off a few times, usually doing something she should not be doing. Someday I will fulfill my dreams of making the girls matching white farmhouse style twin beds and giving them their own cutely decorated bedroom. As for now, considering there are only three pictures mounted total in my entire house (we will have been here two years in January!), this dream is likely to remain such unless I have some burst of decorating energy. Unfortunately, decorating energy is not in my nature. *sigh

At Granny's

This picture is just too cute. We came out for a Sunday afternoon to visit Peter's Granny Clark and celebrate Peter's Mom and Dads' birthdays. The girls chased the cats around until dinner time when Aunt Mimi, Uncle Ryan, Aunt Solange, Uncle Ray, Mima, Liam, and Duncan arrived to share in the festivities. We were also joined by Peter's cousin, Tim. Wish I had captured some pictures of everyone and the giant trifle Granny made for desert, it was delicious!

Aunt Jessie

We were so excited my sister, Jessica, was finally able to come see our home here in Wamego. She cooked us some amazing vegan fare while here. I have come close on a couple occasions to replicating her culinary style, but alas, I got a late start in life with my interest in cooking and I'm having a hard time catching up. As you can see, we were able to fill Jessie's pool quota (two trips minimum) while she was here.

Graci hugging the wall.

Aunt Jessie performing donut torture.

Piper was so exited to float without having to exert any of her own effort to do it.

Pals. Xena loves Jessie.