Mountain Harvest Basket

Walnuts & Catepillers

2011-10-21T15:33:00.001-07:00

Catepillers eating my walnut tree leaves

So can anyone out there tell me what kind of catepillers these are in the photo above? What kind of moth/butterfly do they turn into when mature?

They appear this time of year and eat as many of my walnut tree leaves that they can before I find them. They literally devour the leaves off the tree. I am left with just the skeletal veins of the leaves.

I'd like to know what they are and how to prevent them from eating my walnut tree leaves, if possible. I don't spray my plants and trees with pesticides (or anything), so maybe I'll just have to pick them off each time I see them.

2011 Walnut Harvest ~ with protective husks

The photo of the 3 walnuts above shows my entire walnut harvest for 2011! There were 3 or 4 more nuts on the tree, but the squirrels got to them before I did.

Washed Walnut Harvest

So I cleaned them up and am waiting for them to dry a bit before I eat them. What should I feed my tree to get a bigger crop? I want lots. Not just a handful.

Bah!

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

I lost some weight today!

2011-09-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

Little braids keepsakes...

Maybe 1/2 pound total?

Here's what I looked like a couple of days ago:

Looking like I have looked for the past 10 years or so.

I found it kind of difficult to take a good picture of myself. My arms aren't quite long enough to hold the camera out and get everything in focus. Still, this photo of me with my long straight hair isn't too bad in my own opinion. I liked my long hair. It was soft and flowing. Very natural and for the most part, easy to take care of. I really didn't have to do anything with it except to wash it and comb the many tangles out. I liked how it looked flowing over my shoulders.

It did get in my way frequently, however. Causing me to push it back into a low, unflattering single ponytail. It was hot in the summertime and took forever to dry naturally in the cold wintertime we have here. I was always getting it caught underneath me, or in the car door.

It was time to make a change.

So a few months ago I started thinking about getting it cut shorter. Like when I lived in the big city and got curly perms every few months, only this time I knew I didn't want the perms. I have become a more "natural" girl, not wanting chemicals on my hair or skin or even in my home.

So a bit scared and nervous. Not sure whether I'd like it or not. I made an appt with my local hairstylist to get my hair cut and shaped. She told me to look on the internet to find a picture of a haircut that I liked.

I really liked the way Amy Adams' hair looked when she was playing the role of Julie Powell in the movie Julie & Julia. So I printed some photos and brought them to my stylist.

Now I realize that I am never going to look as cute and young as Amy Adams, but I was hoping that her hairstyle would fit me well and make me look good. I also realized that Ms Adams had a team of hairstylists and makeup artists on hand to make sure she was beautiful, but I figured I'd just have to wing it on my own. Oh well.

So here is a photo of me right after getting my hair cut short today:

Not exactly Amy Adams, but the hair is still cute and perky. It will take some getting used to for me to be comfortable with my new lack of hair. I still feel like I have the long heavy hair flowing down my back. I keep flicking my head to one side to move the hair out of my eyes, but it is not there to move. A weird feeling. Like a limb being missing, sort of.

After I wash it the next time, it will likely feel more comfortable to me.

In this photo below, I can see my Mom looking back at me. I have her eyes and her mouth. Kind of weird seeing Mom in the mirror. Her hair was kind of cut like this late in her life.

This photo is my favorite so far, because it has my sweet kitty Sarah's cute furry face next to mine:

I look kind of odd in this photo, but she is always a cutie.

So that's my personal adventure for today. Till next time...

Fresh Figs!

2011-08-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

That's all.

Just Fresh Figs.

Juicy and sweet.

A summertime treat!

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Strawberry Pies

2011-08-18T16:33:00.001-07:00

Luscious Strawberries, Sweet Glaze and Flaky Crust

So I bought a flat (12 pints) of fresh, locally grown, organic, ripe strawberries. Washed them and hulled them:

Fresh. Ripe. Juicy.

Made a couple of flaky pie crusts:

Ugly but flaky!

Cooked up some strawberry glaze and made two very tasty fresh strawberry pies!

Fresh Strawberry Pie

I also had some berries left over to use in my yogurt and smoothies. Next batch of strawberries will be used to make some homemade jam. Yum!

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Furry Purry Princess

2011-07-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

Going home with Mama Jen

This past Tuesday while buying cat food at our local feed store, I met a cute grey tabby kitten that they had there for adoption. She was all alone in her cage. Her brother had just left to go live with his adopted family literally moments before.

I held this little kitten in my arms as she immediately started to purr very loudly. I talked with her and walked with her for about 20 minutes while Jack found and purchased our case of cat food and loaded it into the car.

Her energy was very sweet. She reminded me of my sweet Jessie in many ways. I just didn't think I was ready to get a new kitten yet. It has been 7 months since Jessie passed away, and I still miss her dearly every single day. My belief is that she will return to me in a new, healthy, young kitten body, sometime soon, but not quite yet. I checked that sense with my inner Guidance and realized that this new kitten was not, in fact, my Jessie reincarnated, but nevertheless, she was definitely meant to come home to live with us.

I left her at the feed store overnight and came home to think, meditate, pray and worry as I tried to decide if adopting a new kitten right now was in my best interest and the best interest of my household.

I don't have a bunch of money, and I already have two cats. Frieda is 18 now and needs special health care on a daily basis. So adding a kitten and all of the expense that goes with it, plus the time a new baby takes was a big decision for me. It's a long term commitment too, as my kitties are definitely my family members, not just my pets. Once they are adopted, they stay with me and they receive the very best of care.

Long story short, my meditation, anguish, worry and prayer produced the decision for me to go back to get her and bring her home to live with me.

She told me that she wanted to be called "Sarah". So that is her name.

Everyone, this is Sarah!

The name Sarah means "lady" or "princess" which seems to suit her personality, at least so far as I can tell. She is a gentle spirit.

She is calm and sweet, but also active and curious. She follows me everywhere and always wants to be under my feet or cuddled up on my chest.

Hi Mom!

My house is NOT kitten proofed! It's been 19 years since I have had a young kitten live in my home. Jessie was the only kitten I have ever had live with me. Frieda and Charity were young adult cats when they found me. So now I must go room to room and make my house safe for the new baby kitty and also for me.

She is about 9-10 weeks old and not quite 2.5 lbs. Counting backward week by week, that means she must have been born in early May. Which makes her a Taurus. My Frieda is also a Taurus. I have yet to see how the two of them will get along together, as the vet recommended I keep them separated for a couple of weeks in case Sarah, being a young kitten, has any kind of virus or infection that might harm Frieda in her more delicate health condition.

Bye Mom!

So I am sharing my bedroom and master bathroom with Sarah and all of her stuff. Litter box, food and water dishes, toy balls, toy mice, bed basket etc. That's not so unusual around here. I have frequently shared my bathroom and bedroom with my kitties. Usually Jessie or Charity when they needed to be doctored and separated from the others. Never one so tiny and constantly underfoot as this one is though. I really have to watch my step around her.

Cat nap time

Sometimes Sarah looks so much like Jessie, as in the photo above where she is curled up sleeping, that I must remind myself that this is a new kitty, a whole new life, my sweet Sarah.

She is a welcome addition to our family. Now you will know who Sarah is when I speak of her in future posts.

She is a gift of love that has brought healing joy to my heart.

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Montmorency Cherries for the 4th

2011-07-02T13:09:00.000-07:00

Cherry Filled Bowl

Also known as "sour" cherries. These Montmorency cherries are best for cooking and baking rather than for eating fresh out of hand.

So far this season I have harvested about 1 quart of these sour cherries, which is about 4 times more than I harvested last year! And there are more still ripening on the tree. Yay!

And yes, of course, I will make my World Famous Cherry Pie with them and probably use the remainder of the Sweet Cherries to round out the taste too.

Summer is definitely here! Hot and sunny (and humid) here today.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July weekend, everyone!

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Just Peachy

2011-06-21T11:57:00.000-07:00

Adult Smoothie!

Hot, humid, sunny weather combined with some beautiful, ripe, juicy organic peaches and nectarines:

Mixed with some creativity and a little rum, amaretto and local honey:

Add a couple of handfuls of ice cubes. Then poured into my favorite crystal goblet:

Made a refreshing "adult smoothie", also known as a Peach Nectarine Daquiri.

Hit the spot yesterday evening after working in my garden for a few hours. The fresh fruit really made the drink special.

Happy Summer Solstice today! Longest day of the year. Enjoy the sunshine if you have it where you are.

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Cherry Flavored Life

2011-06-10T20:27:00.000-07:00

Freshly picked Sweet Cherries from my own tree

Life is just a bowl of cherries! An interesting saying.

Today was a good day. It was finally sunny here, and warm. I wore shorts for the first time in many months. I ran errands. I deposited money. I picked 1.5 pounds of sweet cherries from my own cherry tree, with more on the tree that are ripening. This year I got to them before the birds, the deer and the squirrels did. Hurrah! Hurrah!

They taste very sweet and are filled with sunshine and sweet rainwater.

Some days are not a "just a bowl of cherries". One of my favorite artists, Mary Engelbreit, said it nicely in her work below. I have a copy of this very poster in my home. Helps me to laugh when I need it.

Now every time I see a "bowl of cherries" I think of this illustration. Cracks me up, it's so cute and colorful.

I need more cute and colorful things in my life.

And more sweet, fresh, sunshine cherries.

Happy Spring everyone!

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

She's a Hard Chick Now

2011-04-30T18:40:00.001-07:00

But still very sweet...

Ha! I like 'em chewy.

I hope everyone had a happy Easter and is enjoying soft Spring weather now.

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

St Patrick's Day at My House

2011-03-19T12:09:00.000-07:00

St Patrick's Day Dinner Table Dressed in Green

We all wore green.

To celebrate Spring.

To avoid getting pinched by loved ones.

To celebrate St. Patrick's Day at my house.

See the pretty Irish linen tea towel with shamrocks that my Mom gave me years ago?

Each year I bring out the official Irish Linen shamrock covered tea towel that my Mom gave me years and years ago. I have never used it as a towel. Too pretty for that. I have always kept it pristine and have never even washed it. It is still as crisp and clean as the day she gave it to me. I only use it one day per year for St Patrick's Day decor. I treasure it because it reminds me of her.

So the table set in vibrant green colors, it was time to enjoy a green beverage as is tradition. We all have heard stories about drinking green colored beer on St Pat's Day, but this was dinner at home instead of a party in a bar, so we drank green colored wine instead:

Green Chardonnay ~ Pretty emerald color!

In past years I have made corned beef & cabbage in my crock pot, but this year I had a craving for something a bit more healthy and with less salt, fat and no nitrites/nitrates. So I purchased some inexpensive lamb shoulder chops/roasts (thin) and chunked them up to make my famous Irish/Greek Lamb Stew in my trusty crock pot instead. It was delicious, if I do say so myself!

Irish/Greek Lamb Stew

We each had two bowls full and between us we ate an entire loaf of homemade Caraway Seed bread that I had turned into warm garlic bread by slicing the loaf, adding fresh chopped garlic and olive oil and baking it in the oven until it was warm and crusty. I do think the men ate a bit more bread than I did. I only remember eating 2 slices. Note to self: must bake more bread.

I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful St Patrick's Day however and wherever you celebrated it. What traditions does your family have for St Pat's, if any?

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

From our Farm Store

2011-02-05T12:05:00.000-08:00

Yukon Gold Potatoes & Brussels Sprouts

Got these fresh organic veggies yesterday at our local Farm Store. They just looked so good and fresh in my colander that I had to take a photo and share them with you. Also got some fresh leeks. The potatoes and leeks will be made into soup. The Brussels will be (and already have been) eaten lightly stir fried or steamed. Nice and fresh. Lovely veggies.

I am so grateful for our local organic farmers and their membership market store. Looking forward to Spring and my own garden veggies too.

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

32 Years Ago Today

2011-01-07T21:13:00.000-08:00

On January 7th 1979, 32 years ago today at 4pm, I, at the tender age of 18, married my high school sweetheart, "J". My first love. My first wedding.

It was a beautiful cold winter's day in the mountains just outside of Las Vegas, Nevada. Our ceremony and reception was held at 7700 ft above sea level at the beautiful and rustic Mt. Charleston Lodge. I just found their website, and much to my surprise, it looks the same as it did way back then! Now I want to go visit and check it out for myself. Have a drink, take in the view. Reminisce on my youth.

It was a casual wedding and reception held in their big open A-frame restaurant/bar room. Such a grand view of Kyle Canyon! Snow on the deck where the ceremony was held outside. Beautiful blue and white flowers adorned the wedding arch where we gathered and said our vows. Our family and friends huddled around us, shivering in the January cold.

My Mom cried and was joyful at the same time. My Dad was busy buying everyone drinks. My best friend "B" was my maid of honor. J's brother, "C" was our best man. That was the whole wedding party. Just the four of us. No drama. No trauma. Just 4 friends helping each other through life.

I wore a light blue gown (my favorite color at the time) that I made myself on an ancient long-bobbin sewing machine that I bought just for that purpose. My groom wore a white turtle-neck sweater and a spiffy blue sport coat and light blue trousers. He was so young and handsome! We were so in love!

I'd post photos of the wedding. I do have them, somewhere. But I can't find the album right now. It's here somewhere in my clutter.

It was the seventies! We were both in college. On winter break. In love with each other and in love with love itself.

Our wedding reflected ourselves, our tastes and our view of the world. Small and casual.

My maid of honor's father was a professional photographer, so his family's gift to us was his photography services, proofs and prints of our wedding. So nice.

A friend of my in-laws made wedding cakes. So her gift to us was our yummy chocolate wedding cake with white frosting decorated with bright blue flowers to match our wedding clothes and flowers. Best wedding cake I've ever tasted. So special to have a friend make it.

Our flowers were simple, inexpensive daisies. Daisies, some dyed blue, some natural white. I remember that the florist had to deliver them on Saturday, because they were not open on Sunday, our wedding day. We kept them in the cold garage overnight to keep them fresh.

Instead of a formal sit-down dinner we opted for a lovely (and delicious!) buffet line of hors d' oeuvres and sandwiches. It was great! Everyone loved it. Everyone could sit wherever they wanted. There was no seating chart. People mingled and gravitated to whomever they pleased.

The lodge had a band playing on the weekends, and this was a Sunday afternoon. So the band played for us and our guests. We took pictures. We danced. We ate, drank and laughed.

It started to snow. So many guests were concerned about getting back down the mountain safely. The party ended pretty early. Just our immediate families remained. Then we gathered our things and ventured out to a friend's cabin on the mountain for our wedding night. They let us have it for the night. A cozy, very small, rustic cabin. Perfect for us! We built a roaring fire in the fireplace, cuddled and celebrated the night away. We were young, in love and just married!

Our honeymoon was our drive back to Austin, Texas to go back to school. This time we took our time and visited all of the tourist places along the way. The Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, Carlsbad Caverns, Sandia Peak Tram. We had a wonderful trip and a wonderful time. Good memories for me.

Such memories. So young. So long ago. So much has changed since then. Seems like at least two lifetimes ago. A lot can happen in 32 years.

No regrets ♥.

© Copyright 2011 Mountain Harvest Basket

Future Banana Bread

2010-12-19T16:10:00.001-08:00

Future Banana Bread or Artistic Still Life Display??

My house will smell lovely with the scent of freshly baked banana bread. My taste buds will thrill at the sweetness and delicate crunch of that first warm bite.

That is if I can make the time to actually get into my kitchen and bake it.

Soon, say I. I will do it "soon".

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Whispering Jessie's Song

2010-12-13T18:32:00.000-08:00

I named my sweet Jessie kitty after the John Denver song "Whispering Jessie/Jesse". She has always been a loving and free spirit, like the woman he sings about in the song. It is a beautiful song for my beautiful baby and friend. It makes me cry, especially today. Please enjoy the music and words. Turn your speakers up.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Whispering Jessie ~ My Sweet Baby

2010-12-12T14:45:00.000-08:00

Whispering Jessie Noble
October 1, 1992 – December 12, 2010

My sweet, precious kitten. My very best friend, confidant, and companion. She is the most beautiful of kitties in the whole Universe of kitties, and I told her so every chance I got. She is a sweet, strong and brave girl. She loves me so much, she trusts me with everything, and I love her with all of my heart. There will never be another kitty quite like my sweet Jessie. There is a huge hole in my heart today. A very sad day for me. I will be sad for a long, long time to come. I miss her so.

I named her Whispering Jessie after the John Denver song. Jessie always purred very loudly when happy or when comforting me, but she mewed and meowed in a very soft, whispering voice. Her quiet gentle movements around our home will be missed. Her presence in my daily life filled my heart with love, light and warmth. She taught me so much about love and life. About friendship and commitment, even when times got tough. She taught me to play and to laugh and be happy. She always comforted me when I was sad, upset or crying. She would come to me and purr and rub her face on me, my leg, my hand or my face. Any part of me that she could reach. She was strong and a fighter when it came to adversity. She loved me and trusted me so. Her eyes were bright and deep. Her sweet soul radiated for all to see.

She went quickly and died in my arms. Rest and be at peace now my sweet baby. I love you with all of my heart and soul. Come to me in my dreams and meditations. Visit with me and comfort me. Guide me and love me for all of my days and nights. I know we will be together again. Please let me know it is you when you come to me again. I love you, I love you, I love you more than anyone will ever know. You are the most beautiful of kitties in all of the Universe of kitties. Ever there was.

All my Love Forever,
Mama Jen

Help to Protect Our Pets' Health

2010-12-01T21:45:00.000-08:00

My Sweet Friend and Companion

This is an important issue to me, even more important today since now two of my kitty Jessie’s medications are compounded and created specifically for her. “Standard” pills or capsules in “standard” doses will not work for her or many other pets.

I’ve copied this email letter from the compounding pharmacists organization, and printed it below for you to read. I have forwarded their letter to my main veterinarian and to my pet loving friends. I plan to forward it on to other local vets here in the mountain area.

It's easy to follow their instructions on how to send an email form letter to your congressmen as there is a link at the bottom of the email that takes you to a form letter that we can send. Just fill in the blanks provided at the website with your own name and address and they will send an email letter from you to your local congressmen. It only takes about 1 minute to complete this. You can tell them to send you a copy of the letter they send out for your records.

Please join me in supporting and protecting our compounding pharmacies. I use their services and products for my own hormone supplements too. They have improved my life and now my sweet Jessie’s more than I can express.

We need to have the flexibility and convenience of specially prepared medicines for ourselves and for our pets who trust us to take care of them.

Thanks & Love,
Farmer Jen & Whispering Jessie

Here’s the link to use if the one below doesn’t work: https://secure2.convio.net/iacprx/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=219

Text from the compounding pharmacists email letter:

Protect Your Pet's Medications and Help Save Your Best Friends Life

Do you share your home with a pet? Whether feathered or furry, you know they’re an important part of your family and depend on you for love and care.

Part of that care is making sure your pet has access to the medicines and healthcare that’s right for them whenever illness strikes. The International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists (IACP) wants you to know that there’s something you can do – TODAY – to help guarantee that.

Over the past several months, IACP has worked with Congress to correct a discrepancy in the Food and Drug Administration’s policies on prescriptions for pets. The FDA has declared that preparing compounded medicines from pure pharmaceutical ingredients is inappropriate and even illegal. Why they have that policy is unclear, especially since the Agency recognizes the necessity and appropriateness of pure ingredients for human prescriptions.

And that doesn’t make sense. Your pharmacist needs to be able to use bulk products to customize the right dose for your pet. After all, a small kitten has markedly different medicine needs than a large dog, a parakeet has different needs than an iguana.

Yet, the FDA thinks the only “right” way to customizes medicines for pets is to make pharmacists use commercially available tablets or capsules that may contain other ingredients, fillers, or dyes that your pet can’t tolerate.

What can you do to help fix this problem?

Thanks to IACP’s work on your behalf as a pet owner, we have a formal letter from Congress going to the FDA. IACP has worked hard to secure bipartisan support of this inquiry. Congressman Charlie Gonzalez (D-TX) and Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) have agreed to be the lead sponsors and have already begun working with their Congressional colleagues to obtain as many signatures as possible. The more Congressmen that sign the letter, the more powerful it will be.

As soon as you can, contact your member of the U.S. House of Representatives and ask them to sign onto the Gonzalez/Blackburn Veterinary Compounding Letter. Tell them to contact either Cara Dalmolin in Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn’s office at (202) 225-2811 or Julie Hart in Congressman Charlie Gonzalez’s office at (202) 225-3236.

To make this as easy as possible for you, IACP has also prepared an Action Alert e-mail that will automatically send this request to your Congressman. You and your family can each send an individual e-mail by going to the following link – URL here

It only takes a few minutes to call or send an e-mail about this important issue. With your support, we will have as many Congressional signatures as possible. That will show the FDA that their unfounded and questionable position on the use of bulk chemicals/APIs in veterinary compounding is under serious legislative scrutiny.

Background About This Issue

The FDA has asserted (and in one case issued an injunction against a pharmacy on this issue) that custom preparations of medicine made pursuant to a veterinarian’s prescription cannot use active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), also referred to as bulk ingredients. They insist that compounding for animals must be done from finished (not bulk) product, even if this eliminates treatment options or negatively affects the quality of the medication. This interpretation will have a direct impact on your ability to compound veterinary products from APIs.

This position has far-reaching and negative implications for animal health as this would mean that most compounding could not be done or could not be done effectively. For example, converting a medication into a sterile injectable for a dog that is unable to swallow medication cannot be done from a finished pill; making a cream that is rubbed and absorbed into a cat’s ear must be made from API; and preparing medication for tropical fish eliminates the option of using finished product that has fillers that would contaminate their living environment.

The letter being developed asks that FDA withdraw their earlier guidance on this issue and allow an open comment period before its provisions are finalized. It is imperative that affected parties (veterinarians, pharmacists, pet owners, etc.) have an opportunity to comment on such a far-reaching guidance document.

FDA’s current position on this issue adversely affects pet and animal owners and veterinarians. It also adversely affects compounding pharmacies that make these veterinary medicines per prescription, the vast majority of which are small, family-owned businesses.

Click here to take action!

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Artisan Bread Stuffing Casserole

2010-11-24T10:33:00.000-08:00

*Note ~ this post was originally written in November 2009 and is reposted here from my MotherHen Jen bread blog because I don't have time to write anything new today, and I wanted to share this easy and fresh bread stuffing recipe with you for Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

For many years I purchased the box of dried up bread pieces marketed as "seasoned bread stuffing mix" and added my own fresh ingredients to make a bread stuffing casserole to serve at Thanksgiving dinner. It was tasty enough to please my guests who liked bread stuffing. Me, I never much liked bread stuffing. It didn't have the fresh homemade flavor that I thought it should have. It was either too dry or too mushy for my taste.

Well, this year I decided I could do better than the boxed stuffing mix. So I created a recipe using my own MotherHen Jen artisan breads as the base and then added my other fresh ingredients to make a wonderful and tasty bread stuffing casserole. You can also stuff the turkey with it, but I prefer it as a casserole side dish as I usually stuff my turkeys with a rice & meat based stuffing recipe that was handed down to me from my Mom.

This recipe is flexible on the amounts of fruits, nuts and vegetables that you add in. Add more of what you like best. The broth and juice can be adjusted to your liking as well, depending on whether you like a more moist or a drier stuffing.

It tastes great straight from the oven, warm & moist with a crisp top, but I think it tastes best when served with some nice turkey meat and good homemade turkey gravy ladled over the top.

Here's the recipe:

Bread Stuffing Casserole ~ by MotherHen Jen
for Thanksgiving or Anytime

12-14 oz MHJ Rustic Wheat Bread, (1 small loaf) day old, cut/crumbled into ½ inch cubes
1 C (2 ribs) Celery, chopped
1 C Apple, unpeeled & chopped
½ C Walnuts, chopped
3 Tbs Butter, melted
2 Tbs Olive Oil
1 Egg
½ C Chicken or Turkey Broth
¼-½ C Apple Juice, Apple Cider, Orange Juice or Water
Black Pepper, Cinnamon, Oregano, Basil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees, Butter or Oil a 2 Quart Casserole Dish

1. In a large bowl, gently toss together bread cubes, celery, apple & walnuts.

2. Stir together melted butter and olive oil. Pour over bread mixture and toss gently to coat.

3. Season to taste with black pepper, cinnamon, herbs (fresh or dried)

4. Add egg to cool chicken broth and stir to mix. Add juice and stir again.

5. Drizzle broth mixture over bread mixture and toss lightly to coat.

6. Spoon (use hands) stuffing into the prepared 2 qt casserole dish and bake covered at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Uncover and bake an additional 5-10 minutes for a crisp top. Serve with turkey or chicken and gravy.

Variations:

Substitute other nuts for walnuts or omit nuts

Add raisins, dried cranberries or other chopped dried fruit

Use MHJ Artisan White Bread or Egg Bread instead of Rustic Wheat Bread (or any other loaf of your favorite artisan bread)

To make the savory version, substitute chopped onion for the apples, substitute water or broth for the juice, season with garlic powder instead of cinnamon.

Please tell me about any other delicious variations you create for this stuffing recipe or any recipes using MotherHen Jen artisan bread.

Enjoy!

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Best. Cherry. Pie. Ever!

2010-11-01T17:35:00.000-07:00

Leaky, but luscious, Cherry Pie

First off, this is a VERY belated blog post. I made this cherry pie way back in mid July at the peak of the summer fruit season. Hot days and balmy nights. The whole summer thing. I've just been so busy since then, that today, over 3 months later, is the first chance I got to compose this post.

I've made cherry pies before, but only from canned tart cherries. This is the first time I have ever made a cherry pie from fresh cherries. This time I had enough fresh fruit available and a very handy cherry pitter to make the best cherry pie I have ever tasted. Ever.

This is the first year that I could use fresh sour cherries from my young Montmorency Cherry tree. (I call her Mary Montmorency.) She gave me just over one cup of fresh tart cherries.

(Mary) Montmorency Tart Cherry Harvest 2010

Well, one cup of cherries is not enough to make a whole pie, so I also used a combination of Bing Cherries and Van Cherries from my sweet dual graft cherry tree. Usually I just eat these nice sweet cherries out of hand for snacking, but this year my dual graft tree produced enough for snacking and some baking projects. I had a bit over 3 cups of fresh cherries, tart and sweet ones combined, for my pie.

Combination of Montmorency, Bing & Van Cherries for pie

For some reason my pie crust turned out especially flaky (not sure what I did right to make it that way), and the combination of cherries made this pie taste wonderful. I can only hope to bake another one just as good as this one with next summer's cherry harvest. If not, well, I have my cherry pie memories to savor.

Tart/Sweet Fruit Filling, Flaky Crust

Looks good enough to eat!

Till next summer's cherry harvest these photo memories will have to do!

Gifts from Oregon

2010-09-11T23:13:00.000-07:00

Look at this beautiful personalized Critter Farm birthday card! Just wow!

About a week after my birthday, I received a package in the mail postmarked Oregon. It was from my blog friend Danni, Farmgirl dk of Critter Farm. She had mentioned via email that she would be sending me a little something in honor of my birthday. So I kept a watchful eye on my mailbox.

It arrived at exactly the right time. I was having a bad day, feeling tired and not having much of anything go well. Then this package arrived from Danni. It perked me right up. A friend reaching across the miles to wish me happiness. So wonderful to have friends like this.

So I opened the box to find this dried flower lying atop the packing paper:

Not sure what kind of flower it is, but I was pleased to have a bit of Oregon's nature sent to me. I am saving the seed head and will plant the seeds to grow Oregon flowers of my own. How cool.

Underneath the packing paper I found two colorfully wrapped gifts:

Such cute wrapping paper. I especially like the one with the farm animals

I loved the wrapping paper. I saved the one with the farm animals on it and have shown it to everyone who has come into my home since I received the gifts. It's so Critter Farm. Such attention to the details makes the gifts even more special.

So what was inside the pretty papers? Totally cool gifts, that's what!

Totally cool gifts!

A custom made card, soft & chewy gummi bears and a great book that Danni tells me is one of her favorites. The title is "Peace at Heart" by Barbara Drake. The author has a farm in Oregon and she wrote about her experiences there. I haven't read very much of it yet, as I seldom sit down long enough to read these days, but what I've read so far has really pulled me in. Once I start reading a chapter, I can't seem to put it down till I finish it.

These gifts were perfect. And they arrived with perfect timing. A hand of friendship reaching out to me across the miles making a positive difference in my life. Thank you for your gifts Danni. You made my day so much brighter.

The book will continue to brighten my days. The gummis, well, they were half gone mere minutes after I received them. They are no more. Poor little gummis. All gone now.

Yummi Gummis! So soft & chewy.

I am thankful that I have such good friends.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Happy Birthday to Me ~ A Belated Report

2010-09-11T22:04:00.000-07:00

Look at those cool wavy neon candles! Love 'em!

So this birthday post is belated. Maybe I am moving more slowly since I turned 50. Oh well, here are the highlights of the big "five-oh" last month. It was a good day.

We had my birthday party and "cake ceremony" at Jack's home. This is how it looked when I walked in:

Helium Balloons and Piles 'o Presents!

I was seated at the table and then Jack brought in the flaming cake. The guys were singing the Happy Birthday song to me, so maybe that accounted for the dorky look on Jack's face in this photo (or maybe he just looked dorky):

Jack and the birthday cake he made ~ chocolate, of course

So here's the flaming cake:(Bob was standing by with a fire extinguisher, just in case)

Beautiful cake! Dangerous flames.

Here's me just after I blew out all the candles (Jack wasn't quite quick enough with the camera):

Sort of looks like I am praying (or saying my mantra)

We saved the cake eating for after dinner and I went on to open that stack of gifts, but apparently I didn't take any pictures of that part of the celebration. I loved all of my gifts. The guys did a great job on wrapping and gifting.

We went out to dinner at our local Japanese restaurant a few miles away. We usually sit at the sushi bar or get a table in the dining room, but this time we decided to sit at the teppan yaki table where the chef cooks our food in front of us while entertaining us with a performance, "Benihana" style.

We started with drinks:

I had saki and hot green tea ~ in separate cups

Jack had Japanese beer

First course was miso soup:

Miso Soup

Then started the entertainment as well as the cooking of our meals:

Egg Balancing and Tossing!

The chef artfully sliced up a big onion and then stacked in the form of a volcano, to which he added some "fuel":

Fueling up the onion volcano

Then he lit it on fire, and boy did it flame up!

Flaming onion volcano!

The volcano quieted down and started to smoke while he turned his attention to the preparation of our main courses:

Chicken, shrimp, calamari, scallops and a smokin' volcano

Next he chopped and cooked the veggies and finished the meats and seafood:

Our dinner, artfully prepared

This was my birthday dinner plate:

Veggies, beef & shrimp

We ate until we were stuffed. I took home about half of mine. Had to leave room for some birthday cake and ice cream, don't ya know.

Chocolate birthday cake with my favorite natural peach ice cream.

All the food, the singing, the balloons, the gifts and the love made my 50th birthday a perfect celebration. My thanks to my partners, Jack and Bob, for making my special days even more special.

Late Summer Reflections: 50 Trips Around the Sun

2010-08-19T14:16:00.000-07:00

Late Summer View ~ Dry & Hot

It is the third week in August. Late summer. Almost time for the kids to be back in school. Time to get in that last minute summer vacation.

Some call it the “dog days of summer”. Though the weather is still blazing hot, I know that autumn is just around the corner. Every August I realize this, and every August seems to sneak up on me suddenly as if I didn’t know it was coming. As if I couldn’t read my calendar.

Can you spy the veggies in between the weeds?

There are major weeds in my vegetable garden right now. I have really neglected it this year. I never even got most of it planted, and now it’s too late. For this year anyway. It’s just too hot out, and I have been too busy with other things to pay much attention to my beloved garden. The garden that feeds me. The garden that I enjoy so much.

The late summer season and my neglected garden seem to be metaphors for my own life. I feel as though I am entering my own late summer season, and I am aware that I have neglected many important areas of my life over the past few years.

Oh, I have been busy, not lazy at all. I always have something going on. Some project or plan on which I am working. It just seems that much of my time and energy have been siphoned off lately taking care of other people’s problems, cleaning up other’s messes and trying to find balance in my life that I swear I used to have. I haven’t spent enough time on the things that I love the most in this life. I need to focus more on the things (and beings!) that make me truly happy, that inspire me, that help me to grow and evolve my soul.

Whispering Jessie ~ My Sweet Kitty

Jack & Bob

Each August I think about these things, but particularly so this third week in August of this particular year. This is a special time for me.

Today is my 50th birthday.

At exactly 10am today I turned 50 years old. That’s the big five-oh. A half century. I am a “semi-centenarian”, if there is such a thing.

I guess I am feeling this birthday much more than I felt my 40th or my 30th. With this birthday come many things that have to do with the aging process that I don’t really like.

Physical body changes. Sleep disturbances. Weight gain. Forgetfulness and distraction. Acute mental and emotional awareness that I am not a young woman anymore. These are some of the things that I don’t really like.

The medical people refer to me as a “post-menopausal woman”. Great label. Thanks. Thanks, so much. Accurate, but not very flattering.

Aches and pains seem to occur more frequently now. Stiffness. Especially in the morning upon waking. Waking, that is, if I even get any sleep at all during the night.

I went bra shopping the other day. I really needed some new ones as my old ones were so tattered and worn. This is not a chore that I look forward to. Standing there in the unflattering vaguely blue-green florescent lighting in the department store dressing room looking at that middle aged woman staring back from the mirror at me. That can’t be me, I think to myself. I don’t feel like that woman looks. Didn’t I just turn 20, like yesterday? This woman’s body is overweight and saggy! That can’t be me. And these bras don’t fit like they used to fit on my once thin and sexy young body. It depressed me for a few minutes. Not a long time, I recovered my good mood fairly quickly, but it’s still not a fun task to shop for clothes or intimate apparel these days. Forget about bathing suits.

I need to get in shape and lose some weight. I am not happy with how my body looks or performs. I need my strength and flexibility back. It will take work, but I must do it, and do it soon. I want to feel strong, vibrant and sexy.

When I look in my mirror these days, I see my Mom looking back at me. Now, I love my Mom dearly, and I think she was a very pretty woman, but I am not ready to look as old as she was when I last saw her at age 73 (she passed away 13 years ago). I see more and more of her in my mirror each passing day. I say “Hi Mom” and walk away from the mirror.

My 40th birthday seemed like it was going to be a milestone. A turning point. My entry into middle age. But it really didn’t have a major effect on my psyche. It came and went largely unnoticed.

I remember on my 30th birthday, I sent my Mom a bouquet of flowers with a special note attached saying “Mom, thank you for having me. I love you.” She loved all flowers, and my gift really touched her heart. She thanked me over and over again. I am so glad that I did that for my 30th and did not wait, because my Mom wasn’t here for my 40th. I am glad I got the chance to thank her for creating me, raising me and giving me her love and wisdom. I do still miss her so very much. Especially on my birthday. She always made my birthday very special with her fun gifts wrapped in colorful papers and ribbons.

My Mom ~ Jennie

I think maybe that’s why this 50th birthday is making me pause and think so much. Maybe I am just really missing my Mom right now. I miss her nurturing and her acceptance. I miss her passion for life, her laughter and her love.

A lot has been going on in my life this past year. A lot of changes. A lot of responsibilities. A lot of stress. I have had to deal with letting go of things that I had been holding onto for a very long time. Letting go of some things from my childhood, too. I’ll write more about these things another time, but for now, I guess I have been a bit too focused on my own aging because of having to let go of my childhood things. All at once. With me sort of kicking and screaming to keep hold of them. At age 50. Sheesh.

I need to learn which things to keep and which to let go freely. I need to get my balance back. My joy. My passion. My zest for life. I need to look forward to new chapters in my life. My fifties. OK. If I have to. There are worse things than growing older.

I actually like my life. I am loved. I have friends. I have family. My home is comfortable and pleasant. I have plenty to eat. (too much usually!) I really do have it good. I need to focus on those positive things more often.

This milestone 50th birthday has been a wake up call for me to actively improve the things in my life that need improving and to let go of the things that are not working to make me happy.

It’s time. I have much work to do.

I will start tomorrow.

Today we celebrate and eat cake & ice cream!

Happy Birthday to me! I love you all. Thank you for being in my life. ♥

Take it Like a Man ~ Michelle Wright is HOT!

2010-07-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

I've loved this song (every word of it!) since this album came out way back in 1992. It just has such a good sound. My being totally resonates with it.

I really love her style, her voice, her energy. Such depth of emotion. She speaks my heart.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Midsummer Harvest

2010-07-05T20:36:00.000-07:00

Small Harvest

French Breakfast Radishes, Radish Greens, Snow Peas & Baby Romaine Lettuce. That's all I could harvest today from my midsummer garden. Everything is growing so slowly this year. Except for the weeds! I seem to be able to grow huge, luxurious weeds very well indeed.

Arrgggh!

I just haven't had the time this year to get out there and pull out the weeds when they are small and easier to remove. I know better than to let them grow big, but have not had the time to address them. I will. I really will.

So except for the berries and cherries (I will write about those in another post) and the artichokes which I posted about toward the end of "Spring" last May, I really have not had a very productive garden yet this year. Got started late and things are growing slowly. I haven't even planted some of my summer crops yet! There is still time, but I do worry that summer will be over before I can gather my usual abundant veggie harvest.

I love my garden. I love growing and eating fresh vegetables and fruits. I just need to make more time for it in my life.

I need to be at one with my garden.
Zen gardening.
Yes.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Spring is Finally Here!

2010-05-31T16:38:00.000-07:00

Sweet Strawberries ~ freshly picked

My strawberries have started to ripen. I have gathered those that the birds and bugs have left unsampled. Not many so far, but very nice ones.

Artichokes!

Multiple artichokes have appeared! The most and the largest in the many years that I've had this artichoke plant. Must be due to our prolonged cold & wet weather. I am tired of the cold wet weather, but am loving the artichoke production.

Blue Irises

I used to get many colors and many blooms in my iris beds. Not so much variety in recent years. This year I have many blue and some dark red blooms to enjoy. They do add cheer to my day. You can spy some golden California poppies sneaking in there between the irises.

Spring Bouquet

I made an impromptu bouquet of Sweet Williams, Sage flowers and Lavender. You can't really see the lavender in this photo, but it's there. Really. Lovely scent and color to brighten my home.

Finally, it feels like Spring here today. Tomorrow it will suddenly be summer. Then I'll be complaining that it's too hot...

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Country Humor

2010-05-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

From June/July 2010 Reader's Digest magazine page 39:

A born and bred New Yorker is in the country when he sees a field of animals and says to the farmer, "What a strange looking cow. Why doesn't it have horns?"

"Well, there are several reasons," the farmer replies. "Some cows get their horns late, while others have their horns cut off, and still others never even grow horns."

"And this cow?" the city man asks.

"Well, the reason this cow doesn't have any horns is that it's a horse."

One Month into Spring

2010-04-21T11:40:00.001-07:00

It snowed here last night. Not a lot, but still cold, icy, snow.

Third week in April. It's supposed to be springtime now, right?

My driveway ~ can you see the pear & apple blossoms covered in snow?

It's been a long, cold, wet winter. I am tired of the rain and snow now.

Cherry Tree & Bay Tree ~ snow frosted

CA Redbud Tree ~ in full bloom ~ snow frosted

Note my lounge chair in the photo above. The one I enjoy sunning myself in when it's warm outside. Covered in a thin layer of snow this morning. No sunning myself today!

That's the edge of my main raised bed garden to the right of the photo. Full of snow. Good thing I have been too busy to plant it yet. Only the over wintered garlic grows in there today. I normally have all of my cool weather crops in by the first week in April. Between the weather and my schedule this year, I have done almost nothing to ready my gardens. The guys did help me to weed it. So that's something.

Manzanita Trees ~ pretty when laced with snow

I long for the softness, warmth and sweet scents of Spring. I want to see my gardens grow. I love the little seedlings pushing up from the soil. So brave. So strong. So determined. I love how they grow big and produce much.

Butterflies and flowers. I am so ready for them.

Colorful Roses ~ picked April 18th

The beautiful, sweet smelling roses in this last photo, were picked at my Mom's old house located a couple of hundred miles from here in a warmer sea-level climate. It was actually almost hot there last Sunday when I collected them. They remind me of her.

Mutant Over-Wintered Carrots

2010-04-15T13:49:00.001-07:00

Alien Carrots

This is what happens when you leave your carrots in the ground for a full year from one spring to the next.

You get "Attack of the Mutant Carrots".

Could be the title of a new movie....

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

I Like Peeps

2010-04-06T20:50:00.001-07:00

Mountain of Marshmallow Peeps!

Yes, I like Easter marshmallow Peeps, all of the different colors, especially after they are slightly aged (petrified) and a little chewy, but this many Peeps (see above photo) all at one time is waaay more than I ever thought I would receive in my Easter baskets! I will be eating these sweet sugary Peeps for many months to come.

Whoa! I feel a sugar high coming on...

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Tryin' to Love You

2010-04-03T16:12:00.000-07:00

I love this song. It resonates.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Comfort Food

2010-03-25T19:49:00.000-07:00

Meatloaf & Mashed Potatoes ~ comfort food
(yeah, I know it looks like meatballs, but it's just meatloaf pieces)

I was in need of some special "comfort food" today. So I decided to make myself a nice dinner of my Mom's meatloaf recipe and my mashed potatoes.

Simple food. Meat & potatoes. Not filled with dark green veggies or their nutritious antioxidants. However, I did use natural meat that had no additives, hormones or antibiotics in it. The potatoes were organic russets. Nothing from my garden this time. All from the store.

I just wanted to be comforted, filled up with good food and experience the loving memories of my Mom and my childhood that this meal brings my heart. An easy to make and easy to eat dinner.

Thanks Mom! I love you. Thinking of you today.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Late Winter Greens

2010-03-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Kale & China Choy ~ cold weather greens

We've had sooooo much rain, cold weather and mud around here this winter that I haven't had a chance yet to get out to my main veggie garden to weed and till the soil in preparation for Spring planting. The chore still needs to be done, but will be done later this year than usual.

I did, however, have the pleasure of harvesting some very late winter greenery from that same garden bed last week. Seen in the photo above are some crunchy kale (I forget the exact variety that I planted) and some juicy China Choy cabbage which is similar to bok choy, but not quite as sturdy. When fully mature like these are, both greens are great used in stir fries, soups, stews or simply steamed. When younger and more tender, they are very nice in fresh green salads.

I used some of the kale as an addition to a stir fry dinner a few days ago. Very tasty and also nutritious. I believe that kale in particular contains high amounts of lutein, which is supposed to be very good for eye and heart health.

I will plant more of each of these greens, among others, this Spring after I get a chance to work the soil and prepare the seed beds. Still way too muddy and wet out there today. Maybe next week...

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Communion?

2010-03-09T19:20:00.001-08:00

Merlot & Animal Crackers

OK, so does dunking my animal crackers in my glass of Merlot count as taking Communion?

No?

Hmmm....didn't think so.

Interesting taste combination though.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

And Valentine's Chocolates, Too!

2010-02-17T21:21:00.000-08:00

Heart Shaped Box ~ Dark Chocolates

And....

Rectangular Shaped Box ~ Dark Chocolates

MMMmmmm........creamy rich comforting calories...

Happy Valentine's Day to me from my partners, Bob and Jack!

Such Sweeties, both of them.

© Copyright 2010 Mountain Harvest Basket

Tulips for My Heart

2010-02-11T11:31:00.001-08:00

So I was down by the chicken coop when I heard the Fed Ex truck roll up my gravel driveway. The nice Fed Ex lady handed me this long cardboard box:

I had been warned to stay home to receive a Fed Ex delivery, but I was not completely sure what to expect.

Here is what I saw when I opened the box:

This is how they deliver flowers nowadays. No water. A nice vase. A packet of flower-fresh powder to mix into the water. A nice cellophane, raffia and gauze wrapping:

Colorful Spring tulips! Aren't they beautiful??

So I carefully mixed up the water and the contents of the flower-fresh packet, trimmed each stem a little bit to help the flower drink more easily, and then arranged them as best I could in their very nice vase:

My sweet kitty Jessie supervised the whole process, but I didn't get her picture this time. I think she thought I was preparing something good to eat since I was so busy in the kitchen. Given the chance, she would eat these beautiful flowers as a snack!

So these beautiful multi-colored tulips are a Valentine's Day gift from my partner Bob. Thank you Bob, my Sweetie, for bringing Spring into my home a whole month early!

Beautiful Spring Tulips

I Love Tulips!

Happy Valentine's Day everyone!

Too Busy to Post Anything

2009-12-22T20:10:00.000-08:00

Close Up of my Christmas Tree

As you may have noticed, I have been way too busy and preoccupied with other happenings in my life for the past several weeks to keep up with posting photos and stories in my blogs. I miss writing to you, and I miss the interaction with my readers.

Life has been moving so fast for me lately, that I have been struggling to keep up with it in "real time" and have not had the time or energy to process it, reflect on it or write about it.

So I just wanted to check in to let you all know that I am still alive and still here. I will do a "catch up" post soon and then hopefully get back to more frequent and "newsy" blogging.

As you can see from the photo above, I did manage to get and decorate my Christmas tree, so there has been some joy and some holiday spirit around here in between all of the chaos.

For now, I wish you all a very Happy Winter Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Season's Greetings, Happy Hannakah, Kwanzaa and/or whatever winter holidays you celebrate!

I leave you with this photo of hot cocoa adorned with a homemade (I bought it at our Xmas Bazaar) marshmallow to keep you warm and cozy on these cold winter nights.

Love to you all,
Farmer Jen

Hot Cocoa with Red Sugared Homemade Marshmallow

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Some Days are Like This

2009-11-03T11:28:00.001-08:00

Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns

2009-11-01T14:37:00.001-08:00

Scary Toothy Grin in the dark

Not So Scary in the Light

This is just a quick post to show off our pumpkin carving talents to make this year's Jack-o-Lanterns for Halloween.

First off, we went out and bought field pumpkins because we only grew sweet pie pumpkins this year in our gardens, which are way better for making pies than for carving into jack-o-lanterns. Since Bob really wanted to grow his own pumpkin and make it grow really, really big, I have saved some seeds from these field pumpkins and we will plant them next spring to see if Bob can nurture "the Great Pumpkin" in his garden for his 2010 Halloween jack-o-lantern.

So on to the pumpkin carving. We gathered in my kitchen the night before Halloween, carved designs into our pumpkins, drank hot spiced apple cider and ate Halloween candy. (we don't get many trick-or-treaters around here, so we didn't need to leave much candy for them!)

First up is Bob's fancy design showing off his knife skills (a very sharp knife!) especially around the eyes & eyebrow areas:

Next is Jack's toothless design that seems to have some anxiety and stress going on. Great expression on that one! Kind of disturbing too. Bob mentioned that this face reminded him of someone he knows.

Then there is mine. Sort of cat-like, but with more teeth than one would expect for a cat. The guys said mine was the scariest face. (my pumpkin, not my own face...at least I think that's what they meant!)

Here's the full family trio of scary jack-o-lanterns, lit up and slightly out of focus.

Great fun and great family time. I love pumpkins.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Halloween and got only treats and no tricks this year.

Curious Cat

2009-10-21T13:17:00.001-07:00

Louie Watching TV

Early this past summer I noticed a stray cat hanging around my place. It's not unusual to see visiting kitties out here in the country, some belong to neighbors, some are strays looking for a handout. This cat kept his distance, but seemed to want to come closer and be friends. Friends with me and also friends with my outside cat who spends his days safely outside in the large enclosed "patio" that we built for him years ago.

Unfortunately, since this new cat was obviously an intact male, and I mean obviously, he stressed my outside kitty who is also a male, although neutered and quite friendly. My boy was so upset by this stray cat intruder that he didn't want to eat his food, which is a huge sign that something is really wrong for this particular cat. He always wants to eat his food!

So I checked with my neighbors to see if anyone was missing a cat, and no surprise, that nobody claimed him. One neighbor who has many outside cats told me that this kitty had been "beaten up" by some of her male cats and he looked it too. He had some scars and cuts around his ears and a hurt paw.

I informed our local no-kill shelter about the cat and asked that they take him and get him neutered and adopted out to a good home. They cared, but had too many cats to deal with at that time. So I was on my own if I wanted to take care of this cat and also get him far away from my kitty so that he would relax and eat again.

I made friends with the stray cat by feeding him and day by day he got closer and closer and let me pet him a little bit. I took him to my vet and had him neutered and tested for all the normal cat diseases. He got his basic vaccinations since I doubted he'd ever had any. The vet told me that he was between 12 and 18 months old at the time, which would put his approximate birthday around March 1, 2008, a pisces kitty.

I named him Louie. And then I did my best to convince Hardware Bob that he needed a young cat companion to liven up his house with youthful cat antics. Somehow my convincing worked and now Louie and Bob are best of friends.

Bob sent me the photo above of Louie watching a movie about sled dogs. I just had to share it with you all. It cracked me up with its great amount of cuteness!

So, everyone, please meet our new, and youngest, kitty Louie Blue. (he has light blue eyes)

Louie Blue

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Gala Apple Harvest

2009-10-19T23:25:00.001-07:00

Beautiful Gala Apples

I have several apple trees. One of my apple trees is a "triple graft" that grows 3 different kinds of apples on one main rootstock. This is nice because we only had to dig one hole to plant this tree, but we get a variety of apples. Gala, Jonagold and Mutsu apples are all on this one tree.

The Gala apple blossoms are the pollinators for the other two varieties, and the Gala apples ripen earlier than the other two. Usually I can pick ripe Galas in late August, but this year everything was wacko and delayed a bit. I didn't get to harvest these nice eating apples until about the second week in September.

They were numerous for my small tree, but smaller in size than they have been in the past. All of my apples were small this year. Again, I think it was our crazy weather, especially the extended heat wave we had. I probably should have watered my fruit trees a bit more deeply and more often to help compensate for the extra hot weather. But I didn't.

Anyway, my Gala apples make very good fresh eating apples for snacks and they also add a nice sweet flavor to apple crisps and pies. They are softer than the more common pie apples like Granny Smiths or Golden Delicious, so they do break down more when cooked, but they are still very tasty. I've been snacking on them when I want something sweet instead of grabbing a cookie or some candy. (not that I keep any of those things around my house, mind you)

Gala Apples up close ~ you can almost just reach out and grab one!

Happy Autumn!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Bountiful Basil

2009-10-13T21:32:00.000-07:00

Big Basket o' Basil

Since we were due for our first big winter rainstorm this morning, I decided yesterday that I'd better harvest as much of my remaining sweet basil as I could before the heavy rains hit. I didn't want the heavy rains and wind to damage the leaves or slam the overly tall plants into the mud. One plant has already sort of uprooted itself due to being top heavy.

I have three basil plant clumps still growing nicely in my lower garden. One is much bigger than the others. Eventually I will pull them all out of the ground as the really cold weather comes in, but for now I will leave them to produce more leaves, even if at a slower pace than they did during summer.

The photo above shows the huge amount of basil that I harvested from just my one larger plant yesterday. The basket was crammed full of leaves and stems and was quite heavy. As I came in from my garden last evening just as it was getting dark outside, I wondered where I planned to place all of this basil that I just harvested while it dries. I couldn't hang it outside on the porch as I usually do during fair weather, because it would just get drenched with rain and blown away with the wind.

So I spread it all out on a clean sheet on top of my massage table. That table is 72 inches long by 30 inches wide and I completely covered it in basil sprigs:

Basil on my Massage Table

All that basil was pretty bushy and thick, creating some depth:

Basil~ relaxed & ready for a massage

I let the basil cuttings rest and relax overnight. Then today I created several bunches tied with twine to hang up to dry. Usually I hang them from my herb drying line on my porch, but in wet weather I must improvise:

Basil Drying Hanger ~ one of two

This window is near my woodstove that I use for heating the house in cold weather. A good location for drying herbs.

Well, it has rained all day here and is still storming as I type this. I can hear the wind blowing things around out there. More of the same is predicted for tomorrow. We can use the water, but I'd rather get it a little at a time instead of all at once like this. The ground is slippery with mud and there are many puddles out there that I must watch out for while working outside. Life in the mountains. Never boring.

How's the weather where you are today?

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Small Peach Harvest

2009-10-03T19:30:00.000-07:00

Juicy Sweet Elberta Peaches

As with all of my fruit harvests this summer, my peach harvest was on the small side. My tiny Elberta peach tree is 9 years old, but still only gives me a few peaches each year. This year she grew 12 beautiful juicy peaches, but the birds got to at least 3 of them before I discovered that they were ripe. So I harvested 9 delicious peaches this year from my itty bitty tree. I ate every one of them fresh and "out of hand".

Elberta peaches are my favorite peach by far. They are free stone peaches with dark yellow flesh when ripe, and the outside has a nice tart slightly fuzzy peel that usually has a bit of a red blush.

As a young kid I remember eating my fill of peaches in late summer from the Elberta peach tree my Mom had planted in our backyard. Those peaches were huge and so juicy that when I bit into one, it would dribble juice down my chin and sometimes onto my shirt! I remember the whole sensory experience like it was yesterday. The sunshine warm freshly picked peach, fuzzy in my hand. The soft yet firm flesh giving way to my bite. The juice sweet and tangy at the same time squirting all over me. I loved it. And still do. Every time I eat a home grown Elberta peach those sweet childhood memories of my Mom and her peaches come flooding back to me. We had so many peaches that my Mom made pies, froze some sliced peaches for later eating and gave many away to friends and neighbors. Her tree would bear so heavily some years that the branches would break under the weight if not propped up to support them.

Since then, all other peaches that come my way are measured by those big juicy Elberta memories. Rarely have I found one that could compete.

My peach growing goal is to match that peach production memory of my childhood. Each year I will try my best. Those are wonderful peaches, and wonderful memories that I will keep with me always.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Garden Tomatoes Summer 2009

2009-09-28T21:43:00.000-07:00

Tomato Harvest Basket

As most of my blogging friends and faithful readers already know, my summer tomato harvest was very poor this year. None of my tomato plants thrived. Sure, they grew from little seeds in their recycled yogurt cups filled with good soil into healthy seedlings that I set out in my raised bed garden in late Spring. The summer weather got a late start, staying colder than usual through May. Then the really, really hot weather kicked in with a vengeance. It stayed unusually hot for an extended period of time. So hot and for so long that my tomato plants stopped producing flowers and fruit for several weeks.

The plants were stressed out from the heat. They also had tough competition for water and soil nutrients this year due to the more prolific than usual weeds that quickly covered every portion of my garden bed. The heat helped the weeds grow very tall and very quickly this year. I guess the weed seeds, grasses mostly, entered the garden with my homemade compost that I had worked into the soil at the beginning of the planting season. Usually the weeds are much fewer and a lot less fierce. I blame the heat and just generally weird weather we've had here this year.

I probably should have watered more often and more deeply. I probably should have amended the soil earlier and more often with more compost. But I didn't. The extended heat stressed me out too. I just did not have the energy this summer to devote enough time and muscle power to my gardens.

So the summer growing season is over. My garden is full of plant remnants. Most of them are brown or turning brown now. Some fruits still cling to the vines adding much needed color. The green stuff that is still alive out there is not being very productive.

So my thoughts are already turning to how I can do it better next year. For now, here are a few photos of some of my sad little tomato harvest.

The first little sweet gems I picked this year ~ Red Peacevine Cherry Tomatoes

The first Luther Burbank Red Slicing Tomato ~ about 1/2 the size it should be.

Yellow Slicing Tomato #1 ~ also smaller than it should be

Now for some "artsy" nighttime tomato shots taken on my front porch railing:

Peacevine Red Cherry Tomatoes

Roma Tomatoes ~ smaller than normal and not juicy enough

My first ever Thessaloniki tomato

First Thessaloniki ~ sliced open to taste it and to collect the seeds

I will write more about the Thessaloniki tomatoes in a future post.

I am sadly disappointed with this year's tomato production. I am used to getting pounds and pounds of tomatoes from my small garden. One year, that little garden produced 96 pounds of tomatoes for me, mostly Romas. I canned, froze, dried and sauced until I was exhausted, but I loved my tomato bounty. I guess every year can't be that abundant. Maybe my garden soil is just a bit tired, like me.

All of the above tomatoes are heirloom open pollinated varieties. None are hybrids. This means that planting seeds from these tomatoes will give me the same type of tomatoes next year. Hopefully in a more productive way.

A Bowl of Sunshine

2009-08-30T20:21:00.001-07:00

Sunshine Yellow Meyer Lemons

Look at my bowl full of sunshine! Those are some beautiful home grown Meyer Lemons.

No, I didn't grow them here at Mountain Harvest Basket. It's difficult to grow citrus up here in the mountains. These lemons were a gift to me from Jack who brought them back from Los Angeles a week ago. His sister has a bountiful lemon tree at her house near the ocean, and she gave him a big carton full of lemons to bring home.

This is the second bunch of lemons he has brought me this summer. We have squeezed some directly into tea and on shrimp salad and grilled salmon. We have also made a few batches of fresh lemonade to quench our summer thirst. Very good lemonade! I like to make Greek salad dressing using fresh lemon juice in place of vinegar when making vinaigrette. Using the best dark olive oil I can, of course.

I used some of these juicy lemons to make a lemon meringue pie earlier in the summer. We gave some away to friends and family. We had so many lemons that we had to start squeezing a whole bunch at once before they spoiled so that we could save the juice for later use by freezing it. I have some more squeezing to do here soon. The juice freezes well and will be a welcome treat during the fall and winter months. The tart citrus flavor adds a "brightness" to so many savory and sweet dishes.

I just wanted to share some of my sunshine with you today. When life gives you lemons...☺

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Plum Harvest

2009-08-20T12:35:00.000-07:00

Late Santa Rosa Plums

This is just a quick post to show you my small, but delicious plum harvest. Just one small basket full. My Late Santa Rosa Plum tree usually has a bigger harvest than this, and usually they are ready earlier in the summer. This year probably due to our weird extended hot weather, the plum harvest was pretty small and their ripening was delayed until August.

I picked this basket of plums, which is the entire tree harvest, one afternoon in early August. They are very juicy, tangy and tasty. Just how I like them!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Clever Sun Tea Idea

2009-08-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

Sun Tea Concentrate ~ One Quart Jar

I brew tea in a jar placed in the sun - sun tea - to make and enjoy iced tea all year around. I especially like to make and drink it during the warm summer months. I usually fill a 1/2 gallon mason jar with cool water and add about 4 tea bags or maybe less depending on how strong the tea is naturally. I use different kinds of black, green and herbal teas as my mood dictates.

I place the lidded jar outside to sit in the hot sun for 2-4 hours, again depending on how hot the weather is and also how strong the tea bags are. When the tea reaches the color I desire, I bring in the jar of tea, remove the bags and chill it in my refrigerator to enjoy later over ice. I've been making my sun tea this way for years and years. It works very well. It tastes good, it's easy, it's natural and it's inexpensive.

Being that it was such an uncomplicated process, I never thought about making any improvements to the method.

Well a few weeks ago I learned about another way of making sun tea from Sue of Country Pleasures. She read a post about this method in another blog that she likes to read. So the knowledge continues to get passed on and on from one blogger to the next. I love that!

What they recommended was to make a strong tea concentrate using a smaller jar, like a quart sized canning jar, so that it will take up less room in your summertime fridge. This makes sense to me because during my garden harvest season my refrigerator is always crammed full of produce, jars of water and tea, juice and fruit. There's not much room in there usually.

I took a clean quart sized canning jar filled with cool water and added twice as many tea bags as you would normally put in a quart of water. Then I capped the jar and set it in the sun for awhile to brew up very strong. When it was a very dark colored tea, I brought it inside, removed the tea bags and placed the jar in my fridge. I now had a very strong tea concentrate with which to make my ice tea.

When I desire a fresh glass of ice tea, I add ice cubes to my tall glass and then pour in some of the strong tea concentrate until it fills the glass about 1/4 to 1/3 full. I then fill the glass the rest of the way with cold water from a jug in my fridge. Stir to mix. Add some lemon if I feel fancy, and enjoy my nice cool fresh iced tea.

I thought that brewing the tea concentrate extra strong like that would make the tea taste bitter, but it did not do that. It was very tasty, and that small one quart jar of concentrate lasts for quite awhile in my refrigerator. It takes up less space which I appreciate this time of year.

So I am passing this good idea on to you. Try it. You'll like it.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Canning & Jamming!

2009-08-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

Sunny Apricot Jam ~ 10 Half Pints

Started out looking like apricot soup:

Apricot Jam in Cookpot

My apricot tree did not have even one apricot on it this year. My plum tree had a few beautiful plums, but only enough to enjoy eating fresh. So in my dual effort to clean out my freezers (all 3 of them), and in order for me to even out the "jam vs Jen" score started by that strawberry jam incident last June, I used some frozen fruit to make a couple of batches of jam.

I made one batch of apricot jam and one batch of plum jam. Both fruits were gathered from local trees, pitted and frozen either last year or the year prior. They kept remarkably well in my freezer. Their colors and taste were still quite fresh. When cooked down with the sugar (I don't use added pectin in my jam) both fruits tasted great.

I had an abundance of apricot jam this time. See the photos above. The recipe makes about 8 half pints, but this batch produced 10 half pints for me. I had only prepared 8 jars, so I poured the rest into a pint jar and kept it in the fridge to use now rather than later.

My plum jam, shown below, made exactly 8 half pint jars. One of which did not seal correctly. First time that's ever happened to me in my canning experience. So I placed that jar of tangy plum jam into the fridge next to the apricot jam. Both jams make great PB&J sandwiches, especially on my homemade bread.

Bright and Tangy Plum Jam ~ 8 Half Pints

Here are the plums simmering with the sugar in the cookpot. Sort of looks like plum stew at this point.

Plum Jam in Cookpot

One of my new canning tools that makes fishing the lids out of the hot water in the canner a lot easier, is this nifty lid rack show below:

Canning Lid Rack

Using this rack, I just lower the whole thing filled with washed & rinsed canning lids into the hot water inside the canner to sterilize the lids and keep them warm until I need them. Then I lift the whole thing out and place it on the kitchen counter while I work quickly to fill the hot jars with jam and place a lid and ring on each one. Before I had this rack, I'd have to fish out each lid separately either with tongs or the little magnet tool that worked well, but had a handle that was way too short. Kept burning my fingers. This rack is way better. You can buy it at Lehman's, along with many other nifty things.

So now I have plenty of jam around here for awhile. I may make more before the summer is over. I still have more frozen fruit in my freezers. Nice to enjoy the fruity tastes all during winter.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Garden Garlic

2009-08-04T13:27:00.001-07:00

Garlic Braid

I grow garlic every year. I plant it in the Fall and harvest it the next Summer. I tried growing garlic bought from a seed company the first year, but found that not only was it very expensive, it did not grow well in my garden. So the next year I bought a handful of ordinary garlic from the supermarket for about 50 cents, took it home, separated it into "toes" (leaving the paper skin on each toe), and planted it in my garden pointy side up about 1 inch deep in the soil. I watered it as I would any garden veggie until the Winter rains came. Then I pretty much ignored it and left it to grow on its own until the warmer weather came back the next Spring and Summer.

When the garlic tops (leaves) started to turn brown in late May or early June, I test-dug one bulb to check for size, and then harvested all of the bulbs over the next day or two. I washed each bulb with cold water and veggie scrub brush, leaving the long stem and leaves intact. I then braided the garlic as best I could to hang over my kitchen sink in front of the window to dry and to be handy when I needed it for cooking. I made sure that I reserved 3 or 4 nice looking heads for planting next season's crop.

I have been growing and harvesting my homegrown garlic in this way for the past 10 years. Each year I use some of the garlic that I harvested in the Summer to start my new crop in the Fall. It works very well, and I have been very happy with the results. Some years have been better than others. Other years have had odd weather and small bulbs resulting. Some years have had huge bulbs produced. One year I had an invading gopher (yes, in my raised bed!) and had to dig up my half grown garlic bulbs and transplant them into another raised bed to finish out the growing season while we repaired the hole in the original raised bed. That was fun. Not.

Anyway, until this past year I usually planted the same type of garlic each year. Descendents from that original handful that I purchased at the local market. The common California White, a softneck variety of garlic. I live fairly close to the Garlic Capitol of the World, Gilroy, CA where there are fields upon fields of CA White garlic growing prolifically. I am sure there are other types grown too, but the most common one we see in the markets is CA White softneck.

I have always enjoyed my homegrown CA White. It has a medium-strong garlicky flavor that I used in a variety of dishes. It keeps very well hanging in braids in my kitchen for months after I harvest it in Summer. It is easy to peel once it has dried a bit.

This photo below and the photo of the garlic braid at the top of this post is from my current crop of CA White softneck garlic. I think it is beautiful. I love looking at it, and enjoy having it decorate my kitchen.

California White Garlic

Last Fall, inspired by my local organic farm store's variety of garlic that they had for sale and also by two of my favorite blogging friends, Farmgirl_dk from Critter Farm and frugalmom from Fancyin' the Farm Life and both of their garlic gardening adventures, I decided to try growing a few different types of garlic along with my favorite CA White. I chose about 4 varieties from the farm store. I don't even remember their names. One was purple. One was reddish brown. Another was tan. At least two of them were hardneck varieties. One was the standard CA White like the one I had already grown. I thought I'd compare store-bought to my own homegrown garlic descendents as far as growing and bulb production.

So I planted my usual 5 or 6 rows of garlic, some of the new varieties along with my CA White, each row having about 7 or 8 plants. They all sprouted and grew through the Winter months. This photo shows how my garlic bed looked in late Spring:

Garlic Growing

That's broccoli, lettuces, chard and bok choy you see growing in between the garlic rows. I find that the close proximity of the garlic helps repel the bugs and slugs from my tender greens.

I found that my homegrown CA White garlic descendents grew much bigger and stronger than the store bought CA White, by the way. I have a theory that has proven true with many crops in my garden. My theory is that plants adapt to their local environment, the weather, the soil, the air, the gardener's vibes, and whatever else affects plant growth. I have noticed that each succeeding generation of plants grown from seeds (or in this case, bulbs) from a homegrown plant, is bigger, stronger and produces better than new seeds just being introduced to my garden environment (like from purchased seed packets). This works best with open pollinated varieties as opposed to hybrid plants.

Continuing on my garlic growing adventure, I read all about the phenomenon of garlic scapes on Fancyin' the Farmlife, and then I ran out to my garden with my camera and found these odd looking spiral flower stalks on every hardneck variety garlic plant.

Garlic Scapes in the Garden

I had never grown hardnecks before, only the softneck CA White. This was a new, exciting and weird happening for me and my garden. Apparently, only the hardnecks send up scapes as the weather warms in late Spring/early Summer. The scape is a flower stalk (you can see the flower bud in the photo). It is recommended that the gardener prune off the scapes to allow more nutrition to be available for the garlic bulb's growth. So I did that:

Severed Garlic Scapes

The scapes tasted like "green garlic" and were quite good. I understand that they make a lovely pesto sauce. I used them in my normal cooking as I would any garlic. I chopped them up small and put them in soups, stir fries, stews, eggplant parmesan etc.

And they added delicious flavor to my homemade pizza!

Mushroom Pizza

Homemade Pizza! Yum!

Garlic is good! Plant your own this Fall.

Bread & Butter Pickles

2009-07-20T12:02:00.001-07:00

Homemade Bread & Butter Pickles

Last Friday's visit to our local organic farm store netted me about 4 1/2 pounds of cucumbers. I chose small ones with pickling in mind.

I like making these bread & butter pickles, but my own garden cucumbers are a long way from producing so far this year. Seems like my summer crops all got delayed for some reason. Weeds, probably. I feel confident that I will have my own cukes this summer, but it will be awhile yet. So I took advantage of the fresh organic cukes I found in the farm store this week and made some pickles yesterday.

Last August I was lucky enough to have a large crop of cucumbers in my garden, so I turned 6 1/2 pounds of them into bread & butter pickles

Maybe next month I can make another batch from my own garden, but at least for now, we have 5 new pints of freshly made B&B sweet pickles!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Snow Peas

2009-07-15T21:13:00.000-07:00

3lbs of freshly picked Snow Peas!

My snow peas did well this year. Long cool lead in to summer's hot weather made for great growing conditions for snow peas in my garden. The photo above shows 3 pounds of snow peas, the last harvest for the season which happened a couple of weeks ago. Overall this season, I have harvested over 5 pounds of fresh from the garden snow peas. That's a lot for my small raised bed garden.

Delightfully sweet and crunchy raw as snacks or in salads or sandwiches. I've added them to stir fries and steamed veggies. I've given away several 1/2 pound bags to friends. And I still have a bunch in my fridge. I may blanch and freeze them to use a little at a time in stir fries or soups. I don't want them to spoil and I just can't eat them fast enough!

One of my favorite ways to eat snow peas is in a simple Asian inspired stir fry that I call simply Shrimp & Snow Peas.

Shrimp & Snow Peas

Frozen Shrimp (from Trader Joes) + Fresh Snow Peas + Canned Water Chestnuts

Stir fried in a little olive oil , soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, sesame oil, ginger, black pepper, garlic, lemon, and a pinch of corn starch to thicken the sauce. Eaten over a nice warm bed of steamed white rice makes a very tasty and satisfying dinner. It's good even without the water chestnuts. Just shrimp and snow peas.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Jam & Bread

2009-06-25T22:28:00.001-07:00

Homemade Raisin Bread (left) & Wheat Bread (right) Sandwich Loaves

I finally created a couple of wheat sandwich loaves that were tall enough to produce decent sized sandwich slices. I made one a plain wheat bread and one I turned into cinnamon raisin bread. This was my first time making the raisin bread and I didn't quite get the raisins and cinnamon to produce the nice spiral swirl effect I was aiming for. See the photo below.

Cinnamon Raisin Bread Sliced ~ raisins slightly misaligned

It still tasted good though, even if the raisins were sort of all clumped together in places. Next time I will make a few adjustments to my swirl technique.

Remember that Homemade Strawberry Jam?

I had to make some sandwich bread so that I could eat some of my homemade strawberry jam that gave me so much trouble last weekend. I've been looking at the jars sitting on my kitchen counter all week admiring the deep rich red color. Tonight was the first time I tried some of this particular batch.

It was very good!

Almond Butter & Strawberry Jam on Raisin Bread = Dinner

Really Bad Day in the Kitchen

2009-06-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

I have had my own kitchen for over 30 years now. I have cooked, baked, roasted, stir-fried, sauteed, canned & preserved all sorts of things. I am an experienced cook. I have had my share of kitchen mishaps and disasters over the years. That comes with the territory. Mistakes help you gain experience.

I have burned things, under-cooked things, had things stick to the pan. I've even had things catch on fire! Once, a very long time ago, the kitchen faucet even "exploded" all over me drenching me completely. Those last two were both during dinner parties that I was hosting!

None of those "disasters" can compare to the stupid, stupid mistake I made in my kitchen today. None of those previous mishaps made anywhere near the mess or calamity that I managed to pull off today.

I am so frickin' pissed right now! I am so mad that I feel like crying (for the past hour) but can't even relax enough to allow the tears to flow.

What the hell happened, you might ask? OK, I will tell you.

Remember that beautiful flat of organic strawberries that I wrote about in my last post? Well, I made that nice Shiny Red Pie and ate most of it myself, and then decided to save out enough strawberries to make a batch of strawberry jam. I love strawberry jam and so does my family, so I put aside about 5 or 6 pint baskets worth and waited until today when I finally had time to devote to the cooking and canning process. Fresh berries don't keep very long and I really didn't want to freeze them, so I had to make time in my day to make the jam and get it canned properly. I also wanted to enjoy the creative process.

Ok, so I carefully wash and hull 6 pints of strawberries. I realize I don't have enough sugar for the recipe, so off to the local market I go to buy a 5lb bag. Paid way too much for it, but hey, it's convenient to buy it here so close to home. Back home, I locate my half pint canning jars and a bunch of brand new lids and rims. I wash the whole case of them, even though I will only need 8 or 9 jars for the recipe.

Great, now I have everything I need. Finally. All organized and ready to go. Strawberries, washed and hulled. Check. Sugar, measured out and ready to pour into the cook pot. Check. Jars, lids, rims all washed and sterilized, ready and waiting in the preheated canner full of hot water.
Again, check.

I mash the strawberries with the sugar in the cook pot. I heat them gently until the sugar dissolves. I turn up the heat like the recipe says and insert the jelly thermometer to watch for the proper gel temperature. Up here at 3000 ft altitude, that would be 214 degrees F.

Now all I need to do is wait and stir, wait and stir, until the gel point temp is reached. I've made jam before. I've made lots of jam and many kinds of jam before. Strawberry, blackberry, peach, plum, apricot...even apple jelly. I've made jam. I know how to do it. Really don't even need to look at the recipe anymore, but I do so out of insecurity and...anal-ness.

It's taking awhile to boil and get any reading on the thermometer that is anywhere near 200 degrees. So I remember that I always seem to have the flame too low when I make jam not wanting to scorch the bottom or ruin the batch. So I turn up the flame, and I put the lid on the pot.

Fine. I stand there for a minute or so and then decide to leave the kitchen and go outside for a minute. Just a minute. One, maybe two minutes tops.

Huge mistake! Gigantic, stupid, huge mistake!! Don't ever do this. Don't ever, EVER do this.

I really was only gone for about two minutes. When I re-entered my kitchen the jam pot was fully boiling over and streaming red, gooey, sticky jam all down the pot, all over the stove and all down inside and under my stove top!

It was a big f*cking mess!! I have never, ever made that big of a mess in my kitchen before. There was partially cooked jam everywhere. I moved the cook pot of jam, now only half full. (Crap!) off of the stove. I also moved the very heavy and very hot canner full of sterilized jars and boiling water off of the stove. Removed the burners and then mopped up the thick sticky red mess from the top of the stove with a sponge and a wet dish towel. I was dripping sticky syrup all over the place. Then when I had removed enough of the jam from the stove top to allow me to lift the top and check to see if the pilot light was still lit (it was) I could then see where the rest of my pot of half cooked jam landed. It filled the depressions under the burners with about a half inch of red goo. I sopped that up with the sponge and rag, but it was no easy job. I had to climb halfway inside my stovetop to reach the mess and clean it without burning myself on the pilot flame or without making further mess. It was a crappy job, and I was so angry at myself for allowing it to happen in the first place.

I finally got it cleaned up enough to turn my attention back to my jam pot to see if I could salvage my beloved strawberry jam and all of the work that had gone into it. I wiped down the outside of the pot and put it back on the flame. Put the canner back on the fire too. I salvaged only about 1/2 of the recipe. That is actually what am I pissed off about the most. The mess was bad and unfortunate, but messes happen sometimes. I am really upset that I wasted half of my jam recipe. Those wonderful berries don't come along everyday.

So I finished cooking what was left of my jam as if nothing bad had happened. I turned up the flame to get it to the correct gelling temperature and then I filled the jars and processed them in my water bath canner for 10 minutes. (10 minutes because I live at 3000 ft, sea level would only require 5 minutes)

I lost over half of my beautiful deep red strawberry jam to that overflow spill and to my stupid lack of attention. I am still really pissed.

Oddly, in the middle of me cleaning up the sticky mess, I was composing this blog post in my head. I couldn't wait to tell you all about it. You people keep me sane. Thanks.

Here's a photo of my stupid 4 jars of organic homemade strawberry jam.

Organic Strawberry Jam

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Shiny Red Pie

2009-06-17T20:23:00.001-07:00

Flat of Beautiful Organic Strawberries

I have a whole flat of beautifully ripe, locally grown, organic strawberries.

What to do...what to do...?

Eat several right away before even arriving home with my red bounty?...yes.. that's good.

Mix a few into my morning yogurt along with some of my luscious homegrown boysenberries?....

Mmmm...yes, good again.

Make strawberry jam? Well, yes, but not right now. Must figure out what to do with these fresh berries. They don't keep fresh long you know.

I know!! I will make a fresh strawberry pie! I've never done that before. I've eaten lots of fresh strawberry pie, in restaurants mostly, but never have I made my own at home.

Now where was that recipe I found after much searching and exploring? Oh yeah, right here in my Betty Crocker Big Red cookbook. Silly me. Looking all over the internet for a simple pie recipe and here was one right here at home. Some slight modifications, and the recipe is now mine. Ha!

So made pie I did:

Fresh Shiny Red Strawberry Pie

All those fresh, ripe & tangy strawberries mixed in there with a just a little sugar for sweetness and a little cornstarch to make a nice thick syrup that holds everything together.

Shiny Red Pie ~ closeup

Just strawberries, sugar, cornstarch, water and a flaky homemade pie crust.

Fruit as nature (and Betty Crocker) intended it.

Ooh... a piece is missing...

My Dessert ~ MMmmmmm....

Well, it's almost completely natural and unadorned. Gotta have a little whipped cream for decoration, you know.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Berry Sweet

2009-06-14T12:21:00.001-07:00

Sweet Homegrown Boysenberries

My boysenberries are doing well this year. There are many berries and they are all of good size. They seem sweeter than they have in years past. I think it may be due to our extended cooler weather this year. We have had cooler days and nights during this late Spring than I have ever experienced up here. It is starting to warm up now, and it will do so very quickly. Reminds me that I have a bit of garden irrigation repair to complete before it gets really hot around here.

Well, my berries have been enjoying the weather. My harvest is bountiful. I picked two of those plastic green pint baskets full yesterday afternoon:

Berry Harvest ~ 2 pints!

Of course, I actually picked more berries than the 2 pints worth you see in the photo. Many berries never made it into the harvest basket. (oh my!) Many of them volunteered to go directly into my mouth and skip the basket experience altogether.

And they are sweeter and larger than last year's harvest. I've even been enjoying the redder ones which are tarter than the dark purple ones.

I grow both Boysenberries and Blackberries, but I like the boysenberries the best. Their vines are easier to train and grow. They offer their ripe harvest earlier in the season than the blackberries do. And their seeds are fewer, smaller and easier to chew and digest than the blackberry seeds. Oh, and their vines are thornless! That's a plus too.

Those two pints of berries filled my special berry bowl to the top:

Boysenberries in Berry Bowl

This was my Mom's special berry bowl that she loved. It was a gift from me to her. Now it is mine to cherish. I think of her every time I use it.

Read more about this special berry bowl and last year's berry harvest by clicking HERE.

Have a berry good day!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

White Bread Rising

2009-06-11T22:54:00.001-07:00

White Bread Dough Rising

Homemade White Sandwich Loaf

Same Loaf, Different Angle

Sliced Bread

BLT in the Making (note my homegrown lettuce)

Dinner!

Flowers in the Rain

2009-05-30T16:28:00.001-07:00

Rainy Day Flower Harvest Basket

Today is a blissfully peaceful, rainy, cloudy, sort of cool but humid day here at Mountain Harvest Basket.

My phone has not rung even once today. I can hardly believe that. I pick up the receiver occasionally to make sure the dial tone is still working.

Even my incoming emails have been less than usual. Certainly my outgoing ones are less on the weekends lately.

I love that today is a slow, stay-around-home-and-do-what-I feel-like-doing day. That is such a rarity in my life. Usually I am going in several directions at once with many partially finished tasks all at the same time and juggling phone calls, emails, people, activities, outings and events. I can do that. I am even pretty good at all that coordination stuff, but it sure wears me out to a frazzle sometimes.

Why do I feel like I always have to give 110% of my energy to each project, event or person? Why can't just part of me, my energy or my attention be "good enough"?

Because it isn't. That's why.

I am sure you all can relate to this. Then since it is impossible to give so much of myself to every single thing that I pile up on my massive To-Do lists, I get frustrated with myself and then I feel like I have failed. I freeze and proscrastinate starting projects because I know I won't be able to do them ~~perfectly~~ as well as I would like to. I also sometimes feel like I have let myself or others down in the process.

Sometimes I am just so stressed out that I want to run away, far away, and hide for awhile. I fantasize about jumping into my car and just driving away somewhere. Somewhere peaceful and beautiful. Somewhere where nobody knows me and nobody expects anything from me. It would be peaceful.......for awhile. Crazy thing to fantasize about, huh? Yeah, probably.

I am really not the hermit type in general though. And I can't really jump in my car and just drive away from here in search for peace, beauty and anonymity. I have responsibilities here.

So instead of running away today, I stayed here at my home and listened to it softly rain. Felt the breezes on my skin and the let the big raindrops wet my hair as I weeded my vegetable garden and picked myself a bouquet of lovely Spring flowers to brighten my day and my heart.

I picked a bunch of sweet smelling multi-colored Sweet Williams that grow down in my lower garden near the herbs and berries. While down there I discovered that I had a slightly over-ripe artichoke (also a flower) so I brought it in to eat later as a snack. On my way back to the house I snipped a few bundles of French Lavender that grows in my herb garden right below my bedroom window. Lovely, all of them.

Flowers, especially the softly scented ones, make me happy. Flowers also remind me of my Mom, and sometimes this little girl needs to feel her Mom close to her, especially on a peaceful, rainy, cloudy day sandwiched in between weeks of frenetic chaotic activity. Sometimes I need to remember that I can't do it all or be everything to everybody all the time. Sometimes it helps to imagine my Mom telling me that everything will be OK, and then to see her smile and hear her wonderful laugh...even if it is only in my memory.

Thanks Mom. These flowers are for you too. I know how much you love them.

I can feel you with me in the garden telling the flowers to grow.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Salad Days

2009-05-19T20:17:00.000-07:00

Big Beautiful Ice Queen Lettuce

Remember those big "volunteer" heads of lettuce I pointed out in my last post? This big head shown in the photo above weighed in at 1 pound and provided me with enough crispy cool lettuce for many salads and sandwiches. These big heads started from seeds that last year's plants sowed all by themselves. I also have some Ice Queen babies starting to show themselves in the newly planted section of my garden along with the other Spring greens.

Even with gifting a big head of lettuce each to Jack and Bob, I still have several left out in my garden. I must go out there and harvest them soon though. With this warmer weather we are having, those cool weather greens are starting to bolt. They have already sent tall spikes of leaves upward toward the sun. Next will come flowers and seeds, both making the lettuce leaves taste bitter. I will pluck the remaining heads and store them in the spare fridge. They will keep for a week or two.

I predict lots of salads on my menu for the next few weeks.

Another early season harvest item is show in the photo below and fits right in with the Spring salad theme.

French Breakfast Radishes

These are the first few radishes of many. I have already enjoyed them in a few salads. I noticed that there are many many more waiting to be plucked from my garden soil. Their round red shoulders are showing above the soil line asking for attention.

I really need to make the time to get out there and tend my garden this week. My tomato seedlings are big enough to be planted out there now. I will do it as soon as I remove the new layer of weeds that have established themselves after our rainy and now hot & humid weather.

Maybe if I get up tomorrow morning and just don't answer the phone or turn on my computer, I can sneak outside and play in the dirt for awhile. You think?

Happy Spring weather everyone.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Wet Weather in May

2009-05-02T13:12:00.001-07:00

Seedlings ~ Rainy Day Window

Rainy, grey and cold weather here again today. Unseasonably so.

My tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings, all warm weather crops, are taking forever to sprout their "true" leaves this year. They are growing long and spindly, looking for some warm sunlight. Some have keeled over and died. Usually by now, even though I started them late, they are thriving and almost ready to plant in the garden. It will be a few weeks yet before I can set these seedlings outside.

The photo above was taken this morning. Those are my recycled yogurt container seedling pots sitting up high (out of kitty reach) in my half moon window. This window faces east and usually has hot morning sun, but not today. It is cold and foggy out there even now.

This next photo was taken a couple of days ago when it was a bit sunnier. That's my main raised bed garden partially planted with cold weather crops.

Raised Bed Garden

You can see the garlic growing toward the back. Several kinds of greens are planted in between the rows of garlic. They are still very small and hard to see in the photo. I have found that planting my tender greens in between the garlic plants helps to keep the bugs off of my greens. It's not foolproof. The slugs still get in there as do the pill bugs, but the other pests seem to be repelled by the garlic sentinels. This year I planted spinach, mesclun, bok choy, Swiss chard and two kinds of lettuces. There is also some broccoli on the other side of the garlic patch in the shade when this photo was taken in the late afternoon. It is doing quite well as broccoli likes this cold damp weather we are having.

A big bunch of curly leaf parsley grows to the left of the garlic. That bush was planted there last summer and has thrived all winter providing me with wonderful fresh parsley for my salads, soups, stir fries etc. I did cover it with a milk crate and plastic sheeting to protect it when we had snow and freezing weather during the coldest parts of winter. It did beautifully and continues to thrive there. Unfortunately, the parsley is planted right in the middle of the space where I planned to grow my root veggies this Spring, so I had to plant my beet seeds all around the big parsley bush. Hopefully the beets will get enough sun there. I love hearty beet greens and pickled beets.

Between the parsley/beets and the side wall of the raised bed I planted radishes and carrots and a long row of snow peas. All have sprouted, but are still so small that you can barely see them in this photo.

The foreground of the garden bed is full of many little weeds that will be pulled or tilled under when I get ready to plant that area later in the month.

The big bushy lettuce to the right and in front of the garlic "volunteered" itself from plants that went to seed last summer. That variety of lettuce is Reine des Glaces (means Queen of the Ices) and is a cold hardy loose leaf crisphead. It is one of my favorites to grow. See a better picture of it below:

"Queen of the Ices" Lettuce ~ I call it simply "Ice Queen"

It is one of the lettuce varieties that I planted this year in between the garlic rows. I plant it every year.

Since I had my camera in hand this morning snapping photos of seedlings and the weather, my sweet kitties just had to get in on the photo action. Below is my best friend Jessie looking half asleep as she poses for me in the morning window light.

My Sweet Jessie

And then of course, Frieda had to ham it up for the camera. She posed demurely and waited for me to take this photo of her. All before their breakfast was served, too. Such patience was displayed.

Furry Frieda Poses for the Camera

Well, that's today's garden and weather report from Mountain Harvest Basket. Too wet to be outside today. Back to my other rainy day activities like laundry and baking.

Spring Blossoms

2009-04-24T21:23:00.001-07:00

Braeburn Apple Blossoms

Even though today was cold and rainy here in the mountains, Spring has definitely sprung around here. Earlier this week we had high temperatures in the 80's. It was downright hot! I wore shorts & sandals (and had to shave my legs)!

Anyway, since I haven't posted anything here in awhile, I thought I'd get back into the blogging swing of things by showing you some pretty Spring blossoms.

The photo above is a close up shot of my Braeburn apple tree blossoms. The tree is covered in delicate pink blossoms this year. More than I have seen in years past. I love their pink color. This tree is now 10 years old. Some years it produces an abundance of crisp and tart apples. Other years, not so much.

This next photo is not actually of blossoms, but if you look closely you can see some tiny plums on this Santa Rosa plum tree. It blossomed a few weeks ago, and some of the blossoms and fruit survived the freakish late snow storm we had recently.

Santa Rosa Plum Tree ~ see the tiny green plums?

Next up is my newest Bartlett pear tree. It is so new that it has not produced any fruit yet. My old Bartlett pear died a few years ago. Probably due to gophers attacking its roots (even though I installed a wire gopher basket) or perhaps due to root rot. I am not sure. I purchased and planted this new little Bartlett 2 or 3 winters ago. I usually buy bare root fruit trees. They are easier to handle, cost less and seem to grow faster and stronger when transplanted.

Young Bartlett Pear Tree ~ lotsa blooms, no fruit yet

The photo below is not fruit tree blossoms or even native ornamental flowers. This is a pretty bouquet that graced our Greek Orthodox Easter dinner table last Sunday evening. Bob gave me this bright bouquet of flowers and it added just the right splash of color to go with our traditional bright red Greek Easter eggs.

Bright Spring Bouquet

I will post about both of our Easter celebrations another day. I am so behind on my posting!

Happy Spring everyone! Enjoy the warming weather.

A Sweet Treat

2009-04-10T21:55:00.000-07:00

My Favorite Rum Raisin Ice Cream

Last night I overdosed on my favorite rich rum raisin ice cream. I don't eat it very often, as I don't usually buy it for myself. This little pint of RR was a surprise gift to me from Bob. He knows that I enjoy it especially when I am in need of cheering up. He also knows that bringing me a pint of this special ice cream can effectively get him out of the "dog house" should he find himself in one at any time. It works pretty well.

So moments after he handed me the carton of RR, and while his attention was elsewhere for the moment, I opened it up and dug into its rich creamy goodness. I did share a spoonful or two with him while he was here, but I saved most of it for later after my dinner. Then I totally OD'ed on it before I fell asleep on the couch in a blissful rummy milky slumber.

Mmmmm....creamy rich goodness... and chewy rummy raisins

Thank you Bob! You are very sweet.

Must Be the Weather

2009-04-04T19:30:00.000-07:00

It must be something about Springtime.

It's been almost a year and this post I wrote back on April 10, 2008 still fits me today.

I finally planted the majority of my warm weather veggie seeds in little pots today. I am only about 6 weeks behind schedule! I took photos, but will post them another day. They aren't very exciting yet. Just little pots of moist dirt.

I felt good for awhile today. I felt close to my Mom while I was putting all the little seeds in the soil. I could actually feel her here with me. Smiling and laughing. Guiding me. I turned up the music I had playing on my stereo and even danced a bit around my own living room. I could feel her with me. I started to cry. Happy tears. And sad tears. Both kinds. Like I am crying right now.

I do miss her so much. But I felt her presence with me today. Spring always reminds me of my Mom.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Healthy Baby

2009-03-29T12:41:00.001-07:00

Annelise enjoying the bananas!

Jack's granddaughter Annelise will have her first birthday on April 11th. Her Mom and Dad are having a party for her complete with music, cake, ice cream etc. We are planning to attend, and I will report back here about the festivities.

For now though, I just had to share this latest cute photo of Annelise learning to enjoy healthy foods while shopping with her Mom and Dad!

She is such a cutie! I love this photo.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Belated Birthday Posts

2009-03-09T18:53:00.000-07:00

Candle Forest

Walnut Butterflies

I have been so busy and stressed out for the past several weeks that I have had little time to create blog posts. I did make time to post about my 1/2 birthday celebration and my other milestones, but I neglected to post about Jack's birthday at the end of January and also about Bob's birthday at the end of February. Sorry Guys. You know how busy I have been dealing long distance with my Dad's issues. I know you understand.

Anyway, in this post I will catch up by showing you some photos from both men's birthday celebrations. We all had a fun time, ate too much cake and ice cream and laughed a lot.

In the photos above leading off this post, you can see some close ups of Jack's birthday carrot cake with lemon vanilla cream cheese frosting.

Below is the same cake in all its flaming glory!

Beeswax candles aglow for Jack's birthday

Blow hard Jack! Get them all out. Good job!

Some of Jack's birthday presents waiting for the party to begin

This was a good moist carrot cake...Mmmm....

Along with the cake we had Jack's favorite Natural Vanilla ice cream from Breyer's. No ice cream photos though.

One last shot of the flaming cake before it disappears...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now Bob's birthday is really Leap Day, but we celebrated it on February 28th this year. Bob requested either a carrot cake or a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting for his birthday cake this year. I decided to experiment and give him a little of both.

He got a chocolate cream cheese frosted carrot cake!

Bob's Chocolate Carrot Birthday Cake

Jack supplied Bob's requested ice cream: Rocky Road. Again, no ice cream photos.

Of course there were birthday gifts to go along with the cake:

Gifts and Cake ~ natural beeswax candles, of course

And some balloons too:

Birthday Balloons

Bob successfully blows out all of the candles

Chocolate Covered Carrot Birthday Cake...moist and delicious

I think I prefer the lemon vanilla cream cheese frosting on my carrot cake, but the chocolate cream cheese frosting was very good too. I think the white frosting looks better on the carrot cake, provides more contrast in colors. Both cakes were devoured very quickly.

Happy Birthday Jack and Bob!

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Two, or Maybe Three, Celebrations!

2009-02-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

Colorful Balloons decorated the House

Gifts Piled on the Coffee Table

No, not a birthday exactly, but a 1/2 birthday. My 48 1/2 birthday! (That would be 48.5 for you decimal nerdy friends of mine out there.) Yes, we crazy folks out here in the California foothills celebrate every chance we get, and that means celebrating 1/2 birthdays. So yesterday, February 19th, was my half birthday.

We had my half party at Jack's home, adorned as you can see above, with balloons that both men inflated with their manly hot air. No helium this time, but then helium doesn't last as long as air anyway. These beautiful ballooons went home with me and are presently filling my office with colorful cheer.

The guys gave me some nice gifts. Half birthdays are not supposed to be as elaborate in the gift area as full birthdays, but this year I received some very nice and very useful gifts from both guys.

Before we get to the gifts however, you need to see my favorite photo of the night below:

Cake, candles, gifts and curious kitty!

This is my view of the 1/2 chocolate cake (baked by Bob) just before I made my wish and blew out the candles. Notice Jack's cat, Lestat (named for his sharp teeth), in the background being very curious about all of the interesting things that appeared on "his" coffee table. I just love this photo!

So here are a few of the gifts I received for this year's half birthday:

Loaf Pans from Jack

I received 3 wonderful commercial grade loaf pans from Jack. These pans are heavy duty commercial grade metal pans that I will use in my bread baking hobby. I am excited to have them and can't wait to make some time to use them. Notice that I received 3 loaf pans. Just enough for our family of 3. One loaf of bread for each of us!

Cute Mini Cast Iron Skillet

Bob gifted me with this tiny cast iron skillet. I wanted it for a spoon rest or to use for melting butter. It's adorable, and is presently resting in the middle of my stovetop! I placed the wine glass beside it so you could tell how small it is.

A Pair of Excellent Candle/Fire Lighters

I received a pair of my favorite candle lighters. These babies are hard to find in the stores. They are wonderful because they fold up at an angle so that you can stick them inside a deep candle holder without burning yourself. They are great! I will use them all the time. Good for lighting the fire or the BBQ too. Thanks Bob.

I also received a great cast iron griddle/grill that fits my stove or BBQ really well, and a cast iron food press/weight for meats or sandwiches, but I didn't get photos of them. Bob got those for me, and I am so grateful because I had researched them for about 3 months before deciding which ones I wanted. He got me exactly the ones I liked. I will use them to cook magnificent things for us to eat!

Of course my favorite gifts of all are shown in the next two photos:

Jack

Bob

For this 1/2 birthday party, Bob made me a 1/2 chocolate cake with chocolate cream cheese frosting that you saw in the photo above, but here's a close up shot:

Chocolate 1/2 birthday cake~ or what's left of it

Jack made us his famous Picante Chicken with Rice dinner. It was so delicious that we didn't even take the time to get any photos of it. I provided a simple tossed green salad to round out the meal. We had some nice red wine, good food and good company. A very cozy family celebration. Just what I needed since I've been so stressed lately. Thanks Guys!

Now the title of this blog post says that there was more than one celebration to talk about. My half birthday is the first one.

The second celebration is that today marks my one year anniversary of this Mountain Harvest Basket blog! I started this blog one year ago on February 20, 2008. Hard to believe that time has flown by so fast, but it has. So just imagine in your heads the Happy Birthday Song...

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

Happy Blogiversary and Thank You to my Loyal Readers!!

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

I am so glad that I started this blog because I really enjoy writing about all of the crazy stuff that happens around here, and I have made such good friends through my blogging circle. Blogging has really helped to keep me happy and sane this past year. Thank you all. I love every one of you.

I will try to think of a fun way to celebrate this one year anniversary of MHB in the next few days. Perhaps I'll come up with some sort of fun give away or contest or something. We'll see how creative I can be.

OK, so that was celebration number 2. There's still one more to go.

The third milestone to celebrate is that this blog post is my number 101! Yes, I am one post late. I should have noticed that my last post was number 100, but I have been very busy lately, so I am choosing to acknowledge and celebrate blog post number 101 instead. Yay! Over 100 postings so far! Wow!

There you have it. Three celebrations in one post. Whew! I am tired now. I just can't party like I used to, I guess.

Love to you all. Thanks for being here and sharing my Mountain Harvest Basket with me.

Woman Does Not Live By Bread Alone

2009-02-16T22:36:00.000-08:00

Wheat Bread Loaf #2

...but baking my own bread is very satisfying.

I have made two sandwich loaves of wheat bread in my recent baking flurry. Both of them were made with a combination of White Whole Wheat and All Purpose flours. They came out reasonably well, with good taste and texture and color, but not quite as tall and fluffy as I would like. The white whole wheat flour produces a nice & soft, lighter tan colored loaf. I think I need to either use more yeast or let it rise longer to get the lift I desire in my bread. Or maybe do both.

Baking and cooking is good creative expression for me. It allows me the freedom to design what I want and to make it my own way. Gives me freedom and also some control. I say some control, because my creations don't always turn out exactly the way I want them to. Actually, that's sort of the fun part. A little adventure and surprise in the kitchen. Safe adventure. Just my speed.

I started this recent bread baking because I became aware that I was spending almost $5 per 1 1/2 lb loaf of store bought bread. So I decided that making my own bread would save me some money. It does that. Now I am not sure I can go back to eating store bought bread again. I really like the way my homemade bread tastes. It is so much fresher tasting that store bought. Even when my wheat loaves don't rise as tall as I would like.

It makes great sandwiches and toast.

Slices of homemade Wheat Bread

Hopefully, I will find the time to bake some more soon. I do enjoy it.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Snow Day & Rant

2009-02-13T22:10:00.001-08:00

My driveway view as it began to snow ~ 8:30am

My same driveway view about 3 hours later!

My "snow measurement device" showing about 1 foot of snowfall

The day started off cold and snowy, but I was in an OK mood. It rapidly got worse.

I have been very stressed lately. I've had too much on my plate these past couple of weeks. I've had my head buried in legal software trying to help my Dad write up his Will, Trust, Power of Attorney and Health Directive documents. I've had to learn as I go along. Learning what the documents cover, learning how to write them and learning the legal software that I purchased to produce these documents. My Dad lives in another state (Boy, ain't that the truth!) so I have been trying to work out the details of these docs with him via telephone. He is not the most cooperative of individuals, to say the least. He is aggressive and a control freak. He will turn 90 next month, and has never gotten around to taking care of these important legal documents himself, so I am trying my best to help him, and it is very stressful for me. He doesn't understand all of the legal details and therefore he drags his feet on getting all of this done in a timely manner.

Meanwhile his doctor, the social worker, the home health company and the Adult Protective Services people are all trying very hard to shove him off into the nursing home of their choosing without regard to my Dad's wishes or even mine. I learned today that APS has had a case file open on my Dad for several months now, but not one time in all those months have they contacted me about it, and they have no excuse for that since they have all of my contact info from the last time they got involved in his life and mine. I am so stressed about this that I have been sleeping even less than usual lately. It falls to me to defend my Dad, protect him, watch out for his best interest and now I have to explain everything to the social workers and APS people as if I owed them reports or something. My Dad does not really grasp the seriousness of his situation. I am trying to intervene between him and the APS folks so that I can help him move into better living conditions that will make him happier and healthier. He resists all change and wants total control over everything, even though he cannot handle it himself anymore. He just doesn't realize that I am trying to help him and if he would just get out of his own way we could get the things done that he needs to get done. Arrrgggghhhh!!!

I am very frustrated and many times I have considered just throwing in the towel. If he would just cooperate with me and trust me, I could help him so easily and things would just fall into place to make his life better. But no, he has to over control everything and make everything so difficult, as if the social workers and APS people weren't making life difficult enough already.

Sorry folks. That was my rant for the day. I just really needed to get that off my chest for a few minutes. I am near tears almost all the time these past few days and I just couldn't hold it inside any longer.

What's all of this ranting got to do with my Snow Day pictures I am sharing with you? Nothing, except that I have been cooped up in my house all day dealing with this stuff because we got a foot of snow dumped on us this morning over the course of just 3 hours. The white sparkly stuff is very beautiful, but it does disrupt normal activities. I was supposed to receive a stress relieving massage today, but I had to reschedule it since I was snowed in here and couldn't drive anywhere today. Yesterday, I had to reschedule my own massage clients due to snow as well. So I am cooped up, stressed out, lacking money and needing a massage. Bah!

I was right in the middle of being creative in my kitchen this afternoon, making meatloaf in the oven and chopping up fresh veggies for homemade chicken soup on the stove, when I got the call from the social worker about my Dad. Totally blew away my cozy snow day mood. I was trying to have a little bit of time to myself and feel good in my kitchen. Not meant to be, I guess.

So I built a nice fire in my woodstove to keep the house and me warm today.

Nice warm fire

My kitties know how to get comfy and relax:

Frieda by the fire ~ she wouldn't face my camera

So I guess I just need to take life one day at a time and try my best to remain sane in the process. Some days, like today, I just want to run away and hide from the world.

Thanks for listening. I hope you at least enjoyed the pictures.

Winter Carrots

2009-02-08T11:50:00.000-08:00

Spring Planted, Winter Picked, Carrots

Well, not actually Winter carrots, but Spring planted carrots that I left in the ground until now. I had been meaning to dig up the carrots for awhile now and finally got out there to do it yesterday when I was out there "heeling in" my new blueberry and raspberry starts. (A story for another day.)

They keep well in the ground through the winter months and continue to grow and mature. Unfortunately though, starting in late Fall they start to flower and go to seed, so those carrots that go to seed start using up all of their taste and nutrition to supply the seeds with nutrients for the next generation. Those carrots may become very fibrous and not good to eat. The carrots you see in the photo above were the ones that did not produce seeds, so these should be fine for use in soups and stews. They won't be as tender and delicious as new baby carrots are, but they will still be good eating.

Just look at the huge specimen on the far right of the photo! Wowee! That one is short and very fat. These are Nantes carrots and I did leave them in the ground a little too long. They are not at their best when they grow that big. I give the chopped up carrot greens to my chickens. They are delighted with a nice green salad treat in the middle of winter.

I think I may turn these carrots into carrot soup. Seasoned with ginger. Good hot soup full of beta carotene to ward off winter colds. Now I must find my recipe for that...

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Tea and Cup Wisdom

2009-02-04T13:24:00.001-08:00

Green Teas & Honey ~ No, not contraband!

Just a quick post to let y'all know that I am still here. This past week has been one of the more hectic ones, so this post is fitting in that it shows one of the little pleasures that I have had time for even in the busiest of times.

The above photo shows an old favorite and my new love in organic loose leaf teas. The jar on the left contains organic Gunpowder Green Tea. That's the old favorite. Its leaves are tightly curled up into little grey-green balls, I assume resembling the look of gunpowder, and it brews up into a strong, sort of musty cup of green tea, depending of course, on how much tea is used and how long you let it steep. It gives me a good kick-start in the mornings. I tend to just put a couple of teaspoons of loose Gunpowder green into the coffee filter of my automatic coffee maker and let the water pour through it to make a very nice, very easy pot of morning tea. Works great, although it doesn't sound like it would, does it?

My new love, is shown in the little custard cup on the right of the photo. That is organic Jasmine Green Tea. I have tried many jasmine flavored teas over many years, and so far, after just one cup, I proclaim this one the very best. The runner up jasmine tea was one I found about 20 years ago that had little white jasmine flowers in it, but it was expensive, kind of hard to find and not labeled organic. Now this jasmine tea is still quite expensive. It retails for about $36 per pound, but a pound of tea lasts a very long time. This is top quality loose leaf organic green tea in my opinion.

Both of these teas were purchased by me from the Frontier Naturals company. I am a retailer who sells Frontier Naturals products and their sister company products (Aura Cacia and Simply Organic) so I do have access to their wholesale quantities and pricing. From time to time I personally sample new products with the idea of adding them to my product inventory. These wonderful green teas have impressed me with their taste and their exceptional quality, so I will definitely consider adding them to my inventory. The only hurdle is figuring out some nice packaging to be able to offer smaller, more affordable quantities of tea to my customers. Not many would want to buy a whole pound of loose leaf tea, I think.

These teas have brought me comfort and pleasure, and I'd like to be able to offer the same things to my customers. Any ideas from you all on how I could package a few ounces of tea that would be attractive, sanitary and convenient for my customers?

One more thing to share with you before I go back to my busy work week:

Starbuck's Cup with Quote

This is a photo of a cup that I got at our local Starbuck's Coffee house last night on my way to class. I rarely go into Starbuck's since I pretty much stopped drinking coffee about a year ago, but I still had a bunch of funds left on one of my gift cards, so I thought I'd better go spend them before they close our local store, which could happen any time now if you've been watching the national news. I bought a tea drink that was very tasty and took it to my computer class with me. During a lull in the class activities I happened to notice that my cup had a quotation on it that I read and really liked, so I am sharing it with you today. You can click on the photo of the cup and read the quote directly, but here it is below to make it easier to read:

"The world bursts at the seams with people ready to tell you you're not good enough. On occasion, some may be correct. But do not do their work for them. Seek any job; ask anyone out; pursue any goal. Don't take it personally when they say "no" - they may not be smart enough to say "yes". "

~ Keith Olbermann

I find that the universe reminds me of things that I may already know but have forgotten, right when I need to remember them again. I find quotes like this popping up, books falling at my feet, people I haven't heard from in ages, songs that have a message all presenting themselves to me right when I need to hear, see and know them the most.

They are little reminders to me that we are not alone in this life. We are all connected in some way.

Enjoy your quiet moments. Drink your tea or coffee or glass of wine. Ponder life in all its intricacy.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

OMG PB&J Sandwich-gasm!

2009-01-29T13:17:00.000-08:00

Peanut Butter & Apricot Jam on freshly made white bread

It was so good that I almost forgot to take a photo for you all. That was probably the best PB&J sandwich I have ever tasted.

I like this bread baking stuff. Gonna keep doing it.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

White Bread Again

2009-01-28T22:42:00.000-08:00

Farmhouse White Bread #2

Well, I decided to try baking another loaf of Farmhouse White bread that I wrote about in my previous post.

This time I used the same basic recipe as last time with just a few tweaks. I added 1/4 teaspoon more instant yeast and I cut way back on the salt, using only about 1/4 teaspoon this time, since I found the first loaf a little salty for my taste buds. I also didn't have any bread flour available, so I used all purpose flour with some extra wheat gluten added in (1 teaspoon gluten per cup of flour to make bread flour substitute). Again, I used my favorite brand of flour, King Arthur.

Just for experiment purposes and also because I was too busy today to tend to mixing and kneading bread dough all by hand, I put the ingredients into my bread machine and let the machine do the work for me. After first rise the dough was ready for me to remove and shape into a loaf. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I was distracted by other things and let the risen dough sit in the machine for about 30 minutes longer than I was supposed to.

Well, I took it out and flattened it out a bit into a large rectangle, then rolled it up like a jelly roll into a log shape and plunked into the same loaf pan that used for the first loaf I baked a few days ago. Making sure to crimp the edges together so it would stay together as a nice loaf shape. I covered it with a damp tea towel and set it on a TV tray in front of the fire in my woodstove to maintain a temperature of about 74 degrees F while the dough rose in the pan.

Well, either the warmer room, the little more yeast, the smaller amount of salt or the gluten enhanced flour made this loaf rise a lot more than the first one did. After about 60 minutes it had doubled in size and was pushing the tea towel up and up. So into the oven it went to bake for 35 minutes at 375 degrees F.

It came out fluffy and beautiful. Much more the shape that I desire in a homemade sandwich loaf of bread.

Better shaped sandwich bread

It tasted a better to me than my first try because it isn't as salty, and I like that better. I have already eaten 3 warm pieces of bread with butter, and I usually don't use butter even when I bake. I only use it on fresh warm bread, so this bread baking hobby of mine may not be so good for my saturated fat intake. Perhaps I should try my fresh bread dipped in extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Yes, that might be good.

I will have to see how this second loaf performs as toast and in sandwiches. Will it fall apart or will it be elastic enough to hold substantial sandwich contents? How long will it stay fresh? So much experimenting to do!

I do plan to make bread completely from scratch, doing the mixing and kneading completely by hand again, but I had to try it out at least once using the bread machine. Now I know what results I will get on those days when I don't have time to do it all by hand. I may also have learned something about the kneading process from the bread machine. I may have kneaded the dough a little too roughly by hand, perhaps making more gluten than I needed to, in my endeavor to be thorough my first time out. I am after all, a massage therapist by profession, one whose specialty is deep tissue work which involves a lot of heavy kneading of my client's muscles. I may have taken the kneading job a bit too seriously when making bread the first time. So the next time I make fresh bread completely by hand, I will lighten up a bit, perhaps giving my bread dough a lighter "spa massage" instead of the full up "sports massage". Ha!

Happy baking everyone. Good thing to do on a cold winter's day.

Bread 101

2009-01-26T19:04:00.000-08:00

Freshly Baked Loaf of White Bread

Well, since we have had Muffin Monday and Soup Saturday here at Mountain Harvest Basket recently, I thought it was time for "Bread Baking Sunday". Well, so much for continuing with the fun alliteration...oh well, maybe "Sandwich Loaf Sunday"...

I have baked bread before "from scratch", but always with the aid of a bread machine to do the mixing and kneading etc. I would usually take the dough out of the machine before the baking cycle, and shape and bake it in my oven since I don't like the way my bread machine baked bread turns out. Funny shapes and hard crusts come out of that bread machine, but it does make mixing the dough an easy task. However, easy does not always give a good homemade product. So this time I decided to try my hand at mixing, kneading etc all by hand. I really want to be able to make great tasting, healthy and less expensive fresh breads for myself and my family.

So I started with this recipe I got from Farmgirl Susan from her great blogs Farmgirl Fare and A Year in Bread. She calls this bread Farmhouse White. I have tried several of her other recipes over the past year and have always been pleased with the results.

Since Farmgirl Susan's recipe for Farmhouse White bread makes 3 loaves of sandwich style bread, I decided that for this first bread making experiment I would only make one loaf just in case I really screwed up and it didn't turn out. I didn't want to waste 3 times the ingredients my first time up at bat.

I followed her instructions carefully and I was very pleased with the results of my first time making and baking a loaf of bread completely from scratch. Of course, her loaves of bread look so much better than mine do. Mine wasn't as tall and fluffy looking as hers were. She gives some hints on which loaf pans to use to get that tallness, and my pan was not exactly the right size. This does give me a good data point from which to progress with future baking projects.

I was very pleased with the taste and texture of this bread. It was moist yet not soggy. It was elastic enough to make a good sandwich without falling apart as my previous breads had. It tasted great, perhaps a bit salty for me (since I don't use salt in much of anything), and the crust turned out a beautiful light golden brown.

I will make this bread again. I will find better loaf pans. I will experiment with different kneading techniques and play with the ingredients.

Someday I want to make whole grain breads and crusty artisan loaves as well as this basic white sandwich style bread. I had a fun time baking on a cold and rainy Sunday. I just might enjoy this as a new hobby. I'll see how it goes.

Any suggestions from you all on which bread baking book I should buy that will tell me the basic methods and also have other recipes for me to try?

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Chicken Soup for the Cold

2009-01-24T21:14:00.001-08:00

It is cold and rainy here today. I've had about 4 inches of rain in the past 48 hours here. So says my nifty new digital rain gauge that I received from Bob for Christmas. It actually says 3.99 inches, but I call that "about 4".

Anyway, the skies have dumped a whole bunch of rain on me and my little plot of earth. Everything is wet, cold and muddy outside. I just built a nice warm fire in my woodstove, so it's getting nice and warm in here. I love that lasting, penetrating heat that the woodstove provides. Both of my indoor kitties, Jessie and Frieda, are curled up by the fire as I type this. I love that.

I woke today feeling like maybe a cold was coming on. A little sinus congestion. A few more body aches than usual. I wrote it off to the cold, wet weather and tried to ignore it. Then this afternoon I got a craving for homemade chicken noodle soup. So I made some in my big pot on the stove. Good thing too, because as of about two hours ago, I can feel my ears starting to stuff up, with a pronounced ache in the right one, and a sinus headache starting. I really don't want to get sick. I hate that.

So here's a few shots of my homemade chicken soup:

Sauteeing the veggies: carrots, onion, celery, a little bok choy, a lot of garlic, some fresh from the garden parsley...

I like to have lots of veggies in my homemade chicken soup, and I usually have a nice selection of fresh ones available due to our local organic farmer. I added some chunks of cooked organic chicken breast to my soup and simmered it with the veggies and some homemade turkey stock.

While the soup simmered, I turned my attention to the noodle part of the soup.

I have always wanted to make homemade pasta and noodles, and I even have one of those cool hand crank pasta machines around here somewhere that I bought a few years ago and never used. So I decided that I would search for it another day and just roll out my simple egg noodle dough by hand with a rolling pin:

Noodle dough rolled out as flat as possible, drying before cutting into noodles

Now that I have done the rolling by hand this one time, I plan to find that pasta machine in whatever deep cabinet I've hidden it in. It was not that easy to get that noodle dough to stretch out thin enough for the soup noodles I wanted to make. It kept trying to shrink back up into a thick slab! I coaxed it to lay out pretty flat and thin, but I wasn't that happy with the results.

After letting the dough dry flat for a few minutes, I then rolled it gently and sliced it into noodle ribbons, which I then cut in half because I was making soup not pasta:

Raw noodles dusted with flour drying a bit more before being cooked

Then when the rest of my soup was ready, nicely simmered with the veggies tender, I added the freshly made noodles to the pot and made sure the heat was high enough to boil them gently for about 15-20 minutes.

Here's what the finished noodles and soup looked like in a bowl. Actually this was my second bowl of soup. I ate the first one so fast I forgot to take a picture of it for you.

Chicken Soup for my cold ~ some heart shaped noodles floating on top

So even with big fat noodles that took over the whole pot of soup because they swelled up when cooked, the homemade chicken soup was very tasty, warm and comforting. Two bowls filled me up for a late afternoon dinner on this cold and wet rainy day. I sure hope it makes my cold go away.

Now to go sit by my warm fire and relax.

More Muffins

2009-01-19T10:34:00.001-08:00

Freshly baked banana nut muffins!

Well, true to my word, I baked another batch of my banana nut muffins the other night. You know, just to keep the house warm with the heat from the oven.

This batch of muffins was even more delicous than the last. I've been using more King Arthur brand flour in my baking lately, and I've been loving the great results. The texture of these muffins are really nice. Moist with great crumb, but not soggy. I used half King Arthur all purpose flour (white) and half King Arthur "white whole wheat" flour in these. I am very pleased with that combination. I try to add as much whole grain healthiness into my cooking and baking as I can.

Ready for the oven

I was also pleased to note on the King Arthur flour bag that their flour is milled from all US grown wheat. I like that. They just seem like a really good solid company. I will be using more of their flour in my baking and cooking from now on.

I was watching a Good Eats episode on TV the other night that had Alton Brown telling us all about making muffins. I recall he said we would get more volume out of our muffins if we cooled them upside down on a tea towel. So I tried it.

Muffins cooling

Not sure if I got more volume in my muffins, but it did work well for allowing them to cool nicely. I had them upside down for awhile on a clean tea towel placed over my cooling rack. The tea towel prevents the cooling rack from leaving marks on the muffin tops. It worked.

You will notice that I used paper baking cups to line my grandma's old muffin pan that I use. Keeps them from sticking, reduces clean up and gives them a nice wrapper when sharing with friends. I usually use the standard pastel paper cups that I find for sale in my grocery store. You know the ones, they come in pastel pink, yellow and blue. Well, about a week ago, I was in the baking supply aisle of our Whole Foods market, looking for something else, when I spied some new, more environmentally friendly baking cups.

Natural muffin cups

They are natural brown, made from unbleached paper and compostable. The cardboard box they are packaged in is made from 100% recycled paper. They cost a little more than the regular cups, but not much more.

What I liked best about their performance is that the muffin paper peels off so easily from the muffin, no sticking at all. And they look really nice on the muffins. A toasty brown color instead of the pastel colors. I think it enhances the rustic muffin look. Also I don't have to worry about who gets the pink one or the yellow one etc, because they are all brown... Ha! Yes, I need a life...

Anyway, more environmentally friendly muffin cup info can be found at the If You Care website. Apparently, they make coffee filters and other paper products too. Not a great website, but it does give more info.

Happy winter baking to you all!

Spring in January?

2009-01-16T20:15:00.001-08:00

Spring bulbs emerging early

I know that many parts of the US are having very cold weather right now. Lots of snow, ice and rain going on out there according to the weather news. Here in the Sierra foothills we have been having unseasonably mild weather all week. It's been very sunny and warm during the day with mild breezes. Feels like Spring is happening in the middle of January.

A couple of days ago, I donned a short sleeved tee shirt and a pair of summer shorts and sat in my lounge chair (you know, the lounge chair that was covered in 6 inches of snow not very long ago) to soak up some sun and get my natural vitamin D while reading my newest herb book. I must have stayed out there about an hour just enjoying the quiet day and relaxing. Something I don't do very often. I even heard a few frogs/toads waking up and talking to each other. Sure seemed like Spring was starting in the middle of January.

The photo above shows Spring bulbs, they are either crocus or grape hyacinth, that are planted in my terra cotta bowl on my porch, emerging from the soil as the weather warms up this week. They are even bigger today than when I took this photo earlier in the week.

I know we will get more cold, rainy and even snowy weather before Spring really arrives in March, but for now we are having a nice Spring preview. It is confusing the plants though. They will all pop out and then get snowed on in a few days or weeks. Always an adventure with nature.

For those of you who have colder weather where you are right now, take heart that Spring is not very far away. It will be here soon.

The nights are still cold here. Each day in the late afternoon the temperature drops and my house does get quite cool. I haven't been building many fires in my woodstove yet this winter, but I have been baking things in my kitchen. You know, just to help warm up the house...

Last week I baked a batch of banana muffins to use up the overripe bananas, and to warm up the house, of course.

I need to make another batch, as these are long gone by now, and I have more overripe bananas sitting around. And I need to keep my house warm on these cold nights....yeah...that's it...keep the house warm.

What's the weather like where you are today?

My Christmas Tree Connection

2009-01-11T17:51:00.001-08:00

Sweet Christmas Tree,

Thank you for your beauty and your tallness
Thank you for your greenness, for your health, for your freshness & longevity
Thank you for your patience and understanding and your stately manner

Thank you for being part of my family, if only for awhile
Thank you for the lovely scent that filled my home with wishes & dreams
Thank you for each twinkle, sparkle and especially thank you for your great magic

You filled my heart with love
You helped my little girl to dream and to feel the memories of the warm safe love of my Mom and my childhood home

That more than anything is what I dream of each Christmas and hope to recreate in my own warm and safe home

So now, with gentle hands, flowing but deliberate movements, and many tears in my eyes, I remove your beautiful baubles, your seasonal jewels each one having special meaning to me and a history all its own

I untangle the warm glowing, twinkling lights from your still supple branches
I keep them lit as long as possible to light our way

Lastly I reach up to your highest branch and take down my special sparkly star that you wore so proudly

Thank you for being my friend and for your sweet service this year to make my heart brighter and my home more loving and warm

You will live outside now, on my porch, in the crisp cold air, as did your many sisters that came before you

You will be free and unadorned accept for the winter sunshine, rain, snow and the occasional wild bird that visits us

When you tell me that it is your time to go, weeks or even months from now, I will gently lay you down out by the woodshed to rest and perhaps dream

Dream of the forest from which you came.

Thank you my precious Christmas tree. You brought me happiness and magic. It saddens me to have you leave my home.

I will always love you.

♥♥♥

Ok, so now the whole world knows that I am an overly sentimental and soft hearted little girl who loves the magic of Christmas and misses her Mom dearly every day and feels a connection to her through my Christmas tree.

Oh well.

Menopause for Chickens? I think not!

2009-01-09T19:25:00.000-08:00

Surprise Egg!

Just when I was saying it was kind of boring and ho-hum around here this past week, I go out to close up my hen house tonight in the cold and quiet, nothing unusual except that I notice how beautiful everything seems when illuminated by the almost full moon shining overhead.

I peek inside the hen house to check on my two old girls, Red & Lucy, they look fine. They have food and water and stare up at me from the straw covered floor contentedly, and then just as I was starting to close the door, I spied it! Sitting pretty as can be in the top nest box, was this beautiful, if a little enlongated, light brown egg! I haven't had an egg from my hens for over a year now. I've even stopped looking for them in the nests. That's why I almost missed this one.

I carefully lifted it out of the nest knowing that sometimes a first-laid egg can be soft or malformed. It was perfect. Hard shell. Looked normal. Slightly elongated as they usually are when a hen starts laying again after a long vacation. I guess the egg ducts need some time to adjust to the size of the eggs traveling through them, and the first egg gets a little squished on its way out.

I carried it carefully inside, cleaned it up and took its picture to share with you here in my blog. It weighs exactly 2 ounces for those of you who care about such things. I weighed it just for you.

I think it is beautiful.

And all I can really say is....Wow! One of my hens is almost 9 years old and the other almost 8, as of this coming Spring. I am not sure which hen laid this egg, but either way, it's a pretty big deal for hens that I thought were menopausal. I guess they are not. You go, girls!

They must have heard (from a passing deer?) that things were financially tight around here lately so they decided that they needed to start contributing to the household food supply. We will see if they keep it up or not. They may be just teasing me a bit.

A middle of winter egg from an 8 year old hen! Wow!

Not so ho-hum around Mountain Harvest Basket anymore.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Ho Hum Week

2009-01-06T22:49:00.000-08:00

There just hasn't been anything interesting enough going on around here to inspire me to write a new blog post. I guess I am tired and occupied with recovering from all the activity and stress of the holidays. Lots of people, lots of entertaining, lots of big meals, lots of sweets, not enough rest or exercise or peace & quiet. Sounds like I am getting old...

Anyway, my Christmas tree is still up in my living room:

I love how beautiful it looks (this picture does not do it justice) all sparkly & colorful with all of the many special ornaments collected over the years. Each has a story that is meaningful to me.

While I did take down and pack away the rest of the Christmas decorations on New Year's day, I left my beautiful tree up for awhile longer. It's always the last thing I take down each Christmas season. Partly because it is a lot of work to gather and pack each ornament away, but mostly because it is so beautiful and makes me think of being a little girl again, so happy that it is Christmas. It is magical to me.

So my tree is still up in my living room, but will only be there for another few days, as I must take it down and vacuum all of the pine needles up to ready my home for the new year ahead. Sort of sad though. I really love my special tree.

This week has been a little boring. Mostly full of chores. I have done a lot of laundry:

I did many, many loads of laundry. So much accumulated over the holidays with the extra cloth napkins, tablecloths, towels and sheets. Not to mention more changes of outfits for different occasions and weather. I still have several loads of massage therapy sheets to launder for my business to get back into full swing as the new year starts. Oh joy, more laundry to do...

I spent some time bringing up loads of firewood, pine and oak, from my woodshed to my front porch:

Kindling too. I strained my back, stupidly (I know better than that) , by bending over at the waist to pick up a heavy stack of wood, instead of bending at my knees. My low back and right hip are still sore from doing that a couple of days ago. The massage I received today helped quite a bit, but mostly it will just have to heal on it's own. I know better than to do something so dumb like that, but I just wasn't paying attention. *sigh*

One bright note that happened this week was my receiving these pretty flowers from Hardware Bob:

They really brightened my day and my home. It's been so dreary and grey around here with the cold, wet weather. The colorful flowers are very pleasing. They have a lovely scent that I appreciate every time I walk by. We also went out to a fancy dinner at a nice restaurant last Friday night. Had the whole place to ourselves! Very quiet and relaxing, if a bit too expensive. I like being pampered now and then. Makes me feel good.

Well, back to work for me. Must get the place ready for my massage clients tomorrow. Clean this, organize that...it never ends.

See, I told you there wasn't much to write about this week.

© Copyright 2009 Mountain Harvest Basket

Christmas Week 2008

2008-12-28T00:14:00.001-08:00

It's been a really busy, fulfilling, happy and sometimes stressful Christmas week around here. So busy and rushed that I have fallen behind in my blog writing. I still don't have a lot of words to post right now, so I will share some of our Christmas experiences through the following photos. These only show a small portion of our Christmas holidays, but it does give you the highlights.

I also plan to share our Winter Solstice celebration with you too, but I will write about that some other time. First my Christmas week 2008, which was enjoyed in my favorite way, right here in my warm home in our beautiful and peaceful mountains, with my closest family and friends and my beloved pets all around me.

Cards from friends and family

Our Stockings hung with care ~ on the stereo cabinet, I have no mantle

Kitties and Chickens Stockings too...

Pinecone Decorations inspected & approved by Jessie

Cranberry Bread baked for gift baskets and snacking

Packages wrapped beautifully ~ Jack does great ribbon work. Bob does great bows.

And placed beneath the Christmas tree...

And quality inspected by Jessie

Christmas Morning ~ my Jessie is my Baby, and sooo cute...

Christmas Goodies ~ all homemade & delicious!

Dinner Table Setting ~ nothing very fancy, just colorful

Christmas Dinner ~ Beef Tri-Tip Roast, Green Salad, Roasted Potatoes, Fresh Cranberry Sauce

And homemade Cherry Pie with ice cream for dessert

Boys play with their trains

All is calm and all is bright...

We did have a White Christmas after all. Snow fell late on Christmas Eve and during Christmas Day to leave us with just a couple of inches on the ground and on our cars. Most of it melted away the next day, but it was beautiful to watch the fluffy flakes fall on Christmas. So peaceful. I love watching Mother Nature's artistry. Today was sunny, crisp and cold. We gathered together again last night to feast on leftovers, eat cookies and fudge, drink hot toddies and play with our new toys. We have all had colds these past few days (The hot toddies were medicinal) and have been doing our best to keep our energy up and remain in good spirits for each other. It's been a little stressful at times, but we are a close family and work everything out eventually.

This was another good Christmas around here, and it's really not over yet. Later today, Jack's son arrives to visit & celebrate with us for a few days, and we will be visiting Bob's daughter and son-in-law tonight too. All in all, a busy and full week for us here at Mountain Harvest Basket.

Still Cold Here

2008-12-20T18:33:00.000-08:00

Yard Art Hen & Chick in the Snow~ where are the other 3 chicks?

It is still very cold here today. Much snow is still on the ground, at least in the shady places. No new snow for a few days, but very cold temps have kept the snow around and made the roads and driveways icy.

It's been so cold in fact, that I moved my remaining two old hens into my living room a couple of nights ago.

Hens in the House

I think they were getting a little frostbite happening on their combs and wattles. I brought them inside to warm them up and to observe them. They seemed fine the next day, so I moved them back outside after adding more straw to their nest boxes and replacing their light bulb (used for warmth) with a higher wattage one.

I heard a strange sound a few nights ago, and wondered if it was a bobcat or coyote. Then I found these tracks on the snow.

Animal Tracks

They look more like dog tracks than a bobcat or even coyote. I did also see a stray dog running around by my driveway that same day.

I have been staying mostly inside and keeping warm with my electric heaters or with a fire in my woodstove. Of course, these beautiful red roses helped to keep my heart warm.

Thank you for my roses, Bob.

With the cold weather, and me being more housebound, I've been baking more often this week too. I find that using the oven to bake something really helps to heat the cold house and also makes some delicious food too. I love that it serves two useful purposes at the same time.

More Cast Iron Skillet Cornbread ~ this time with whole wheat flour added

I also baked a nice apricot crisp last night. No photos. No crisp left either. Between me and the guys, it is long gone already!

Happy Winter to you! Winter Solstice is tomorrow. Celebrate by lighting a candle and thanking our Universe for the light, the warmth of the sun, and the seasons.

I am thankful for all of you.

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Let it Snow!

2008-12-15T11:50:00.001-08:00

It started last night...around 7pm

and snow fell off and on, mostly on, all through the night. So far, it has accumulated to about 6 inches deep at my 3000 ft elevation. This is what it looked like around my place this morning:

Porch Railing doubles as "Snow Measurement Device"

Frosted California Redbud Tree

I probably won't be driving anywhere today...

Or sunbathing in my lounge chair either...Bbbrrrrr...

Not much sun present today to melt the snow off of the solar pathway lights

Oh well, it needed refilling anyway...

Won't be gardening today...too cold for that

Might watch some TV...this dish works even with the snow on it

Of course, I won't be doing much of anything if the electricity goes out as it frequently does this time of year. So I wanted to get this quick blog post up so that my faithful readers will know what's going on here in my world and know that I am still alive and kicking even if I haven't been posting much lately.

Almost time for Winter Solstice, but not quite.

Is it snowing where you are?

Bon Hiver & Happy Winter (a bit early) to you all!

Winter Green & Cornbread

2008-12-07T19:59:00.000-08:00

Green Pumpkin & Parsley

It has been warm for several days and then cold at night, and now it is finally getting colder during the day and very cold at night. My porch thermometer reads 44 degrees F as I type this.

I plucked this last sweet little pie pumpkin from my garden about a week ago. I kept waiting for it to turn orange first, but I couldn't let it sit out there in the cold weather any longer. I brought it inside in the hopes that it would ripen indoors. It is doing just that, although very slowly. There are some flecks of orange on it and I placed him with his orange colored sisters hoping their ripeness would "rub off" a little on his green little self. There below is my whole pumpkin family for this season.

Small, sweet & tender pie pumpkins

So with the weather getting much colder now, I figured I'd better harvest the last little green bell pepper from my garden. I had left the plant in the ground due to the extended warm weather and because it had a pepper growing on it. It was fairly protected in my raised bed garden, blocked from cold north winds by the back wall of my house. The nights have been getting far too cold for a hot summer crop like bell peppers! Reports of temps in the 30's made me concerned that this little green pepper gem would shrivel up and be culinarily useless, so today I plucked it right off the plant and brought it inside with a brief stop on my porch for a photo op with her neighboring parsley plant.

Green Bell Pepper & Parsley Harvest

My parsley plants are still growing strong, and I bet if I protect them with a cold frame for the winter, they will last right through until spring and keep on producing for me. I use parsley in so many things, not just as a pretty garnish. I like to put a healthy handful in my green salads and I love to cook with it. It is very nutritious.

To change the subject slightly from green garden things to warm food for cold days, take a look at the nice cornbread I baked in my cast iron skillet a couple of weeks ago. I had never used this skillet for baking before, and I am very pleased with the results. The cornbread was delicious!

Delicious hot homemade cornbread

I just had to show it to you. Now I made myself hungry. I guess I should go make myself dinner now. No cornbread in the house though. Guess I'll make a sandwich...

Red Flowers to Cheer Me

2008-11-23T18:14:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago I was grumbling about how the cold, rainy, grey weather was adversely affecting my mood and that my pretty red petunias had died after living through 2 summers and last winter. I wrote that I really missed their colorful red faces that greeted me when I went out to my front porch.

Well right after I published that post, Bob visited our nearest big city and brought back a beautiful red flowering plant for me. It is a cyclamen. I've never had one of those before. Look how beautiful and bright red it is!

Bright Red Cyclamen

Since receiving this cyclamen it has really blossomed out. It has 3 times as many flowers on it right now than it had when it first got here.

Then, a few days later, I was over at Jack's and was admiring his potted rose bush by the front door. So he gave me a full deep pink bloom to take home with me. It is so deep pink that it's almost red. See it there next to my pink wine:

Beautiful Rose Bloom

This cut rose bloom still looks just like this and it is almost 1 week old today. It's really lasted a long time for a rose.

Both of these flower gifts have made my life and my home a little cheerier. I am grateful to have such wonderful partners who love me and give me little reminders of their love all the time.

I love flowers. I love to receive them, and I love to grow them, but I have been so busy growing vegetables & fruit for the past 10 years, that I really haven't grown many flowers. Sure my red petunias lasted in a pot on my porch for awhile, until they died recently. My roses struggle along never quite blooming enough to suit me. Something ate my daisies. The gophers eat my tulip bulbs and the deer scarf down the blooms. My irises grow, but don't bloom that much anymore. I guess my lavender plants flower pretty well all year. They have sort of taken over my herb garden. And the amaryllis bulbs that my Mom gave me years and years ago, called Naked Ladies, a light pink showy blossom, do pretty well each summer, although I think the gophers may get to them too. The only flowers that do really well each year are my spring daffodils. Nothing eats them and they poke their bright yellow heads up to face the warm spring sun only to get rained and snowed on for their bravery. I love how brave they are. I want to be like them. Sunny, bright, delicate, yet strong and brave.

Be a flower. Brighten someone's day.

Thanks Bob and Jack for my beautiful red flowers. I love them, and I love you.

© Copyright 2008 Mountain Harvest Basket

Harvest Dinner 2008

2008-11-21T21:41:00.001-08:00

Harvest Dinner 2008

For the past decade or so, at least since my Mom passed away, Jack and I usually travel to the LA area to attend Thanksgiving dinner at the home of one his relatives, usually one of his sisters. This means that for several years I did not have the pleasure of preparing and hosting a big Thanksgiving dinner celebration in my own home with my family and friends. It also meant that I did not get to make the traditional foods for Thanksgiving the way my own family did or the foods that I had learned to make as a young woman when I was married (both long ago).

So a few years ago I started the tradition of having what I call our annual Harvest Dinner celebration in the comfort and relaxation of my own home, with my friends and family, with my traditional foods, served on my favorite plates, with my festive tablecloth, using my serving dishes, my decorations etc etc. In other words, Harvest Dinner is Thanksgiving my way.

Here is our Harvest Dinner invitation that we gave to our family and friends:

The 3 of us invite you to share in our annual Harvest Dinner. It’s our way of celebrating our abundance and to give thanks to the earth, our loved ones and our universe (spirit). Sort of like traditional Thanksgiving, but not on Thanksgiving Day.

I like to include a moment or two before we begin eating the feast of food to express our thankfulness for all of the abundance that we have. Some would call this moment of thanks a prayer or the traditonal grace that is said to give thanks for our meal, but I mean it to be much more than mere gratitude for the food. This moment of acknowledgement for our great abundance, is meant to bring into our consciousness how fortunate we are to have not only an abundance of food on our table, but also our great abundance in many other areas of lives. We have homes, health, safety, freedom, friends, family, and most of all we have love. So as we raised our wine glasses to toast a Happy Harvest, we thanked each other for being being here, Mother Earth for our abundant harvest, and Spirit for guiding us each day. Then we dug into the mounds of food on our plates.

Some years I have printed out this grace that I found in one of my Mom's books long ago, and we have made it a part of our Harvest Dinner thankfulness moment. I do not know who the author is:

This is a time for giving thanks
This is a time for remembrance

Let us remember our past and
Give thanks for what we have become

Let us be present in the present and
Give thanks for the here and now

Let us remember our future and
Give thanks for all that is to happen to us

Let us give thanks for the whole universe
Especially for our creation
And the life that is in us

Let us give thanks for that consummation of all things
Which Spirit is working out in us

May light and love surround us
And guide us to right action

I think it is a lovely, although lengthy sentiment.

Anyway, I wanted to share our most recent Harvest Dinner with you. We usually have it on a Sunday afternoon about two weeks before Thanksgiving. We had our 2008 dinner last Sunday, November 16th.

Here's the menu:

2008 Harvest Dinner Menu

Appetizers
Baby Carrots & Celery
Mixed Nuts
Olives
Goat Cheese & Crackers

Main Course
Free Range Turkey
Greek Stuffing
Bread Stuffing Casserole
Cornbread Pudding
Mashed Potatoes
Turkey Gravy
Pineapple-Orange Sweet Potatoes
Fresh Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce
Jellied Cranberry Sauce

Desserts
Apple Pie & Sugarless Apple Pie– both by Bob
Pecan Pie – by Jen
Pumpkin Pie – by Jack
Whipped Cream

I got lots of photos of the food, but absolutely none of us or our guests! We invited Bob's parents and a close friend of the family to make us 6 for dinner. Just the right amount of people to fit around my dining table.

So what follows here are the photos of our food feast with no pictures of any people or pets! Oh well, I guess I was totally focused on getting the food prepared and on the table for everyone.

Harvest Dinner Dining Table

That tablecloth was made by me 15 years ago for a Thanksgiving dinner I hosted in my little condo in Southern California, long before I moved to the mountains and my rural life. I still love the tablecloth and its rich colors.

Buffet Table set up in my kitchen

We served the food buffet style on a portable table set up in my kitchen. Everyone filled their own plate with whatever they desired from the buffet setup. I find this is the easiest way to serve the food because all of that food would never fit on my dining room table. This also eliminates the need for everyone passing heavy hot serving dishes around the table. It limits spillage and other dining "disasters".

The roasted turkey before being carved

I try to buy naturally raised hormone and antibiotic free turkeys when I cook turkey. I find that I like the way they taste better, and I feel better about buying a turkey that was raised without chemicals. This one was a Diestel Farms brand turkey. That's the brand I usually buy.

On our buffet table there was:

Roasted Turkey ~ light and dark meat

Pineapple Orange Fresh Sweet Potatoes

Bob's Famous Creamy Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Turkey Gravy ~ photo taken while gravy was cooking

My Mom's Greek Chestnut Stuffing

Cornbread Pudding ~ made this year by Jack

Bread Stuffing ~ Mrs. Cubbison's with my "doctoring up"

Fresh Whole Berry Cranberry Sauce

Bob's parents brought some flaky dinner biscuits that were wonderful, but I failed to get a picture of them. Trust me, they were good.

And then after dinner we had pie! Errr...make that pies. Plural.

Jack's creamy Pumpkin Pie

Jack tried a new filling recipe this year that used real cream instead of evaporated milk. It was a richer pumpkin than I have had before.

Bob's Sugarless Apple on the left, and regular Apple on the right

Both apple pies were great. I couldn't even tell the difference between the sugarless and the one with sugar in it.

My Pecan Pie ~ tasted great even if the crust is ugly

Well, that's it for this year. The turkey and all the leftovers are long gone by the time I am writing this post. Maybe next year I'll get a photo or two of the people as well as the food!

Happy Harvest everyone! And Happy Thanksgiving!

I Planted Garlic Today

2008-11-12T21:17:00.000-08:00

Prepared Garlic Planting Bed

Yup, I am leading off with a picture of dirt. That's not just any dirt. It's carefully prepared planting soil in my raised bed veggie garden. First I loosened the soil down about 4 inches or so with my special hand tool called a Korean Weeder/Cultivator. It was a gift from a friend several years ago. I didn't take a photo of the one I used today, but did find this one on the web to show you:

Korean Weeder/Cultivator

It's great for loosening the soil and digging up the weeds to prepare a bed for planting.

After loosening and weeding, I spread about two buckets full of aged homemade compost across the bed and mixed it in and smoothed it with the weeder. Then I used a standard cultivator tool to make 5 long rows across the garlic planting bed. I know from previous planting experience that I can get 5 rows of 7 or 8 garlic plants in this little square section of my raised bed garden. The square section is 1/8 of the total raised bed space, and I use a different section each year to rotate my crops and avoid diseases and soil burn out.

I chose this section of my garden today because I haven't planted garlic there for a few years and I intend to plant my lettuces and leafy greens there in the spring. I will plant them in between the rows of garlic that I planted today. The garlic tends to keep the bugs away from my greens, and that's a good thing. Garlic takes up very little garden space, so there is plenty of room for the greens to grow in between.

After soil preparation and row making, I went to fetch my garlic cloves. I usually only plant Calfornia white garlic (the kind they grow in Gilroy, CA the "Garlic Capitol of the World") because that is what I started planting years ago and have had great success with it. It is a medium hot garlic that is quite juicy, and I like it's flavor very well. I find that if I save a few heads of each harvest to plant the next year, the garlic flavor keeps getting better and better.

Well, this year I planted 5 different kinds of garlic, for two reasons:

One, I neglected to plant any garlic last year, so I did not have any garlic heads saved out to plant this year. All I had were a few cloves that were part of the 2 or 3 heads of white garlic that "volunteered" themselves in my garden this year. I must have missed them and left them in the ground when I harvested my summer 2007 garlic.

and,

Two, I was influenced by both Farmgirl_dk's great post about garlic on her Critter Farm Blog last month where she talked about several kinds of garlic, and also by visiting my local organic farmer's store and finding many different kinds of organic garlic available for me to try.

I don't remember all the fancy names of the garlic varieties that I purchased and brought home to eat and plant, but here is a photo of the cloves I chose for planting today:

Garlic Cloves for planting

Clockwise from the upper left corner of the picture are purple cloves that came from a purple colored garlic head, tan or red cloves that came from a white head, my few homegrown California white garlic cloves that I saved from the volunteer garlic this year, purple cloves that came from a white colored garlic head, and lastly at the bottom of the frame we have white cloves that came from a white headed garlic that I bought in the organic farm store.

My guess is that the purchased white garlic cloves are the same CA white garlic variety that I have been planting for years. They look the same and felt the same when I broke the head apart. The shape of the cloves was sort of rounded as opposed to elongated like the "red" variety.

The rest of the purchased organic garlic that I planted today is a mixture of hard and softnecks, reds and purples, most likely all grown from seed garlic purchased at Peaceful Valley Farm & Garden Supply. Our local organic farmer and I both buy seeds and some supplies from Peaceful Valley. Actually though, my first CA white garlic that I planted years ago, was conventionally grown garlic that I bought in the local supermarket for mere pennies.

Garlic is easy and fun to grow. I am excited this year to see how the new varieties of garlic will grow and produce.

So I finally got around to planting my fall garlic. Probably took me longer to tell you about it than it did to prepare and plant it!

Plant your own garlic. You will enjoy it.

Weather & Mood

2008-11-09T16:44:00.001-08:00

Fire in the Morning Sky

These very early morning photos were taken by me a little over a week ago. I couldn't sleep so I got up before dawn. Rising early is a rare occurance for me since I usually don't sleep very well these days. That morning we had some clouds in the sky and the sunrise was so beautiful that I ran to get my camera. My front porch faces east, so these were all taken standing on the porch looking eastward toward the nearby mountain ridges.

I love the beauty in all of these photos, but I really adore that bright fiery look of the first one above.

This next one was taken a few minutes later when the dawn light was more mellow and pale:

Yellow Dawn

Then the lovely pink hues of the next photo made me say "ahh" as I took the shot.

Pink Sunrise

I wondered to myself as I enjoyed nature's beautiful sunrise display, why I don't make the effort to get up earlier and enjoy this peaceful time of day more often.

Since these photos were taken, we have had a couple of rainstorms pass through our mountain area here, dumping loads of heavy wet rain on us pretty early in the season. We went from very dry cooling weather, to very wet chilling weather very quickly. Everyone and everything here is trying hard to adjust to the rapid change.

It gets chilly in my house mid-afternoon now. I started building fires in my woodstove about a week ago. That stove really warms my home with steady even heat that penetrates the whole house. The ground outside is more than damp. It is muddy! Everywhere is drenched. Wet leaves on the ground. Mud and debris stick to my shoes causing me to brush them off before entering the house.

The weather has been kind of grey lately with the abrupt change, and so has my mood. I have been grumpier than I'd like to be more often than I'd like. I guess my body is trying to adjust to the weather changes and so is my mind. I am disgruntled over my pretty red petunias that were so nice a couple of weeks ago. They have died with the cold weather. They made it all the way through last winter and choose now to die, before we even had snow yet. I miss their colorful red faces that greeted me every time I went out on my front porch.

My garden is going dormant. I've been pulling out the dead veggies. All the tomatoes, squash and even the spring broccoli plants are gone to the compost pile now. I still have some carrots and even a couple of bell pepper plants still out there freezing their leaves off. Probably should bring them in now.

I did harvest my late planted canteloupes. See the baby-sized melons in the picture below:

Baby Canteloupes ~ baseball size and smaller

Next year I will start them earlier and feed them some nutritious compost to grow them bigger and faster. The one I cut (see photo) was very tasty. I enjoyed the orange fruit and the chickens enjoyed pecking at the green part on the peels.

As I mentioned in my last post, well over a week ago, I did clean and roast the Halloween field pumpkin seeds.

Clean Raw Pumpkin Seeds

Pumpkin Seeds ready to Roast

I salted and seasoned them with some spicy stuff and gave them to Jack and Bob to enjoy.

This afternoon Bob brought me a bouquet of roses to brighten my spirits. So not all is grey around here. Some things are still bright and red:

Beautiful Red Roses

I am lucky to have good friends, partners and my loving pet companions in my life. I really never lose sight of that even when I am grumpy. I guess I just need to make my own sunshine when it's raining and cold outside.

Halloween Pumpkin Celebration

2008-10-31T19:32:00.001-07:00

Bob's Pumpkin from Halloween 2007 ~ Jen added the greeting

Tonight is Halloween night so last night the 3 of us got together in my kitchen and carved our Halloween jack o' lanterns. We started this tradition several years ago and I really enjoy the evening.

We each picked out our own pumpkin. Each one had its own personality that spoke to the new owner. This nice whimsical round one is mine:

Isn't he beautiful? So round and orange.

We set up our work space in my small cluttered kitchen. The guys shared a work table, while I used my kitchen counter.

Jack and Bob carving their pumpkins and having fun. (the front of Jack's sweatshirt says, "When did my wild oats turn into shredded wheat?" Ha!)

Here's my cleaned out beauty:

And here's just some of the gooey insides that came out of our pumpkins.

Stringy stuff & seeds ~ I will roast the seeds later, maybe tonight!

I will save a few of these field pumpkin seeds to plant next summer. These field pumpkins make great Halloween and fall decorations, but not so good pies. For pie making, I grow special small and tender Pie Pumpkins

The rest of the pumpkins seeds I will salt and roast in the oven. Probably later tonight or tomorrow. Jack really likes them. I find them a bit tedious to get out of their shells.

Now comes the artistic portion of our program:

Jack carefully drawing his pumpkin face features

Bob concentrating hard on his careful carving ~ notice his open mouth with his tongue poking out like a cute little kid hard at work

I don't usually draw or plan my pumpkin faces. I just carefully clean out the insides and then stare at the front of my pumpkin for several minutes until some creative idea comes to me. Then I just pick up a sharp knife and start carving. Usually I do the nose first, then the mouth and last the eyes.

We have found over the years that we each have our own unique pumpkin carving styles. The faces vary from year to year, but our unique styles remain consistent.

Here is our finished trio of carved jack o' lanterns:

Jack's on the left, mine in the middle, Bob's on the right

Jack's scary faced pumpkin all lit up!

Bob's happy vampire pumpkin glowing eerily!

My crazy laughing wacko (menopausal!) pumpkin on fire (hot flash!)

Our family of jack o' lanterns ready for Halloween night

Happy Halloween Everyone!! May you only get treats and no tricks.