Twice baked pumpkin seeds... sort of

The reason that they're twice baked is because I screwed them up the first time and didn't bake them for long enough. Ahem.

Aaaanyway, moving right along....

This isn't really a recipe, more of a method, but here we go.

First you take a whole mess of pumpkin seeds (I filched these from the pumpkin carving with dad that the kids in my kindergarten class did) and clean all of the pumpkin goo off of them.

And don't worry, I know that some of you are thinking ewwwww that was weeks ago, I know, I baked the seeds weeks ago.

I just suck at posting in a timely manner.

When your seeds are clean, spread them out on a baking sheet and toss with salt.
The amount of salt depends on the amount of seeds you have. I tasted my seeds as they baked and adjusted the amount of salt as I went. Also, the moisture left over from washing the seeds helps to distribute the salt, so don't worry about drying them. 

When I baked these the first time I put them in at 325 degrees which was too high, the seeds started to brown too quickly and didn't dry out enough which made them really chewy. Yuck.
So, I threw them back in the oven the next day at 200 degrees which was perfect. You just need to stir the seeds every twenty minutes or so to ensure even baking, and leave them in until they are nice and crispy.

These came out nice, light, salty and crispy. They're totally addictive. And now that I've found a great source of pumpkin seeds, supply won't be a problem. I can't wait until next year.

Dichotomy

 This just so neatly illustrates the difference in my children's personalities.

And another one bites the dust.

Pumpkin down, pumpkin down!

Ewwww.

P.S.  - I meant to post this a week ago, when I took the picture. Sorry.

Happy Halloween!

What's in a name

So one of my little boys gets on the bus today, looks up at me and says:
"It's not Timothy* anymore, it's just Flash. Flash the kid."
'Nuff said.


*Names changed to protect the innocent, of course.

I know you're probably sick of them, but hey look, more apples!

At the risk of driving you all nuts with too many apple related posts, I found a really nifty and delicious recipe for applesauce.

My mom and I wanted to use up the leftovers from our pie-making session, so we made applesauce about a week ago. It turned out so well that I needed to make another, bigger batch because the kids and I went through our half in about two days.

Our version of the is recipe is adapted from Ina Garten's baked applesauce recipe.

The original called for the zest and juice of two oranges, but with very few exceptions I've found that I just can't stand orange in recipes, so we left that out. Also, after the original batch, I decided to tone down the allspice and the cinnamon just a tad. The cinnamon was okay in the first one, but it was waaaaay too allspicy. Is that a word? Anyway, so yeah, scaled that down by half. The end result was yummy, and dead easy to make. Also, after tasting this batch I would scale back the cooking time a bit too, it turned out sort of dry, which is interesting because I didn't know that applesauce could be dry.

Anyway, here's the recipe:

Dead Easy Baked Applesauce

- 6 lbs of baking apples (I used Jonagold both times)

- 4 TBSP of butter 
- The zest and juice of one lemon
- 1/2 c. brown sugar, packed
- 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon
- 1/4 tsp ground allspice


Preheat your oven to 350 degrees (which I always forget to do.) 

Peel, core, and slice your apples. This step becomes really easy and fun (especially if you make the kids do it) when you have one of these. I love mine. Intensely. The first time I made apple pie I didn't have one. It was a sad, sad day.


Throw all of your apples and the rest of the ingredients into a dutch oven or enameled cast iron pot. Give it all a good stir and pop it in the oven. 

Now, go read a book or something for about an hour. 

I opened the pot periodically just to mix everything together. This also had the side benefit of making the house smell ridiculously good. 

Check it after an hour. The apples should be extremely soft and the mixture should be somewhat juicy (this is where I overcooked mine.) 

If you like your applesauce lumpy like we do, all you need to do when it comes out of the oven is give it a good stir. If you like it smooth, just whisk it really well until all of the apples are broken up.

Tada!

Ummm...

My car has sporadically started not starting. Help!

Wait, did that make sense? Started not starting...

Anyway, when the kids and I went to leave from Alex's Taekwondo class tonight, Bob (yes, we've dubbed our car Bob, it stands for Bucket of bolts) wouldn't start. Ack!

Well, Bob finally started, but now I'm freaking out.

I know the battery is good because I just put a new one in, and my neighbor helped me replace the starter motor just a few months ago. What worries me is that this is exactly what happened when the starter motor went out.

Crap.

Grateful

I am blessed beyond measure by the people that I'm surrounded with at work. 

Things have been hard recently, well, not that they're ever not hard, but lately things have been incredibly difficult. 

The kids and I are living on the raggedy edge right now, and every. single. day. has been a struggle.  

To put food on the table.

To keep a roof over our head. 

To keep the lights on. 

To put gas in the car.

To pay for daycare. 

And in the midst of all this I have seen the most amazing outpouring of love and care and concern from several of the people that I work with. Some are dear, close friends, and some I only know as acquaintances, but all of them have touched my heart recently. 

We all had our hours cut at work, we are all struggling, but despite all of that they have still reached out to the kids and I and blessed us by bringing over groceries, by giving me money and not taking my 'no' for an answer, by giving me hand-me-downs for the kids, by giving me a hug when I need it, and by simply being there for me. 

These wonderful, sweet people have been God's love letter to me over the past two months and I am filled with nothing but gratitude.  

The Lord's Day

" We can rejoice, too, when we run into problems and trials, for we know that they help us develop endurance. And endurance develops strength of character, and character strengthens our confident hope of salvation. And this hope will not lead to disappointment. For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love."

- Romans 5:3-5

Sorry it's been quiet...

We had a garage sale today.

Pity me.

I hate doing garage sales. You get up at the butt crack o' dawn, spend countless hours beforehand getting all the stuff ready and schlepping it down out of the attic,  and then to add insult to injury you mark your stuff down to ridiculously low prices only to have people look at you like you're crazy when they ask you how much it is, after which they proceed to try and haggle you down. 'You want one dollar for that very nice, clean, almost brand new coat? How about twenty-five cents?'

Sigh.

I made about $30 all told. Oh well, at least it was enough to cover the gap to pay the portion of my electricity bill that will keep them from shutting off our power (which was the goal anyway).

Excuse me while I go collapse.

The Great Gummy Bear Saga of 2011

If you ever get the urge to buy your kid a giant gummy bear, do yourself a favor. Don't.

Now while this might seem like common sense to most people, it apparently wasn't to me.

I was in World Market at some point during the summer and saw these huge gummy bears. I'm telling you these suckers were at least five and a half inches tall and three inches wide. Stupid me thinks, 'Oh, cool, Alex loves gummy bears. He'll totally flip when I bring home this giant one. How fun will that be?'

Bad idea.

Well, the reaction was what I wanted. He loved it, and I felt like super-mom until super-mom got the bright idea to take said giant gummy bear over to grandma's house the next day to show her. Now I have to point out that it was high summer in our neck of the woods, and at this point temperatures were reaching the mid if not the high nineties every day.

Back to the gummy bear.

Alex showed grandma, who thought it was cool (if a bit weird) and then he promptly forgot it in the car that night. Sigh.

Sometime the next afternoon we were heading back over to my mom's house and I opened the car door to a horrific sight.

Alex had left the gummy bear in its plastic case in the front seat.

The gummy bear melted in the ninety plus degree heat, oozed out of the packaging and left an enormous puddle of red, sticky goo all over the front car seat.

Words cannot express.

Have you ever tried pulling up a melted, giant, gummy bear off of your car seat? No, I bet you haven't because you are probably a sensible, sane human being that doesn't buy the stupid giant gummy bear in the first place. It was like pulling up tar, it was like pulling silly putty out of the carpet (yep, done that too), it was like trying to get gum out of hair (haven't actually had to do that one. yet). Oh. My. Gosh. 

The good news is that, with ALOT of hot water and soap, my car seat is surprisingly no worse for the wear.

I never. ever. want to have to do anything like that again. But, knowing myself, and unfortunately I know myself pretty well, I'm sure that something ridiculous like this will happen again in the near future.

I'm overdue you see, it's just how my life works.

The Lord's Day

"Do not be afraid, 
for I have ransomed you. 

I have called you by name; 
you are mine. 

When you go through deep waters, 
I will be with you.

When you go through rivers of difficulty, 
you will not drown."
 
Isaiah 43: 1b - 2a

Oh my, apple pie.

Whew! I am officially worn out.

The kids and I went over to my mom's house at around 10:30 this morning, and we just got home at around 5:45. No, we didn't spend all of the day actively working on the pies, but it did take most of the day. We stopped for lunch and we also ended up going to this really neat little folk art fair on the spur of the moment with some friends of my parents. I'll post about that later.

Back to the pie.

First of all this is my absolute favorite apple pie recipe. Ever. I got the recipe from Rose Levy Beranbaum's The Pie and Pastry Bible, and it is amazing. What makes the flavor of the pie so incredible is that you slice and mix your apples with sugar, cinnamon, lemon juice, nutmeg, and salt and let them macerate on the counter at room temperature for three hours. This allows the juices to gather in the bottom of the bowl. Now here comes the really wicked part. You strain out all of this juice and boil on the stove with butter to make this syrupy, carmely, deliciousness which keeps the pie from being too wet really concentrates the apple flavor that you get in the pie. Yum.

Here's aaaaaallll of the stuff that I schlepped over to my mom's house.

 

These are my mom's counters, not mine, aren't they nice? Unfortunately you saw mine a couple of posts ago, sorry about that.

Here's all of our apples including my moms. Hmmm, It looks like I underestimated the amount of apples that we had. I think we lost some to attrition and, um, eating.... Mostly eating....

 Apple slicing in progress:

Here's what the apples were mixed in: granulated sugar, brown sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon juice, and salt. Yummy.

 Lots and lots of pie crust.

And, here's the finished product. Tada!

Aren't they pretty? I think they turned out really well, I can't wait to taste them. Oh, we also made a quick little tart with some of the leftover pastry and apple mixture, but I forgot to take a picture of it. We threw it in the oven at my mom's house, but it wasn't quite ready when the kids and I left. Before I even got in the door at home, my phone rings.

It was my mom telling me how awesome it turned out and that I probably wouldn't be getting my half of it. 

Baking

Well you know that pie crust recipe that I tested well it turned out really really good. Damnit. Pillsbury was so easy....

So, today I'm hauling two kids, two refrigerator drawers full of apples, an apple corer, assorted ingredients, and a partridge in a pear tree over to my mom's house who is also in possession of two refrigerator drawersful of apples to have a marathon apple pie baking session.

Whew, it makes me tired just saying that. So last night after hauling my sorry carcass home from work (I've been sick all week, so I'm a pretty pathetic sight right now) I made two batches of pie crust and stuck it in the freezer.

If I don't forget my camera, and I don't forget to take pictures, I'll have another post for you later.

Also, I don't know what you're doing this today, but if you live in North Carolina the weather is absolutely gorgeous. Get yourself outside and enjoy this lovely Fall day. After piemaggedon I'll be taking Alex and Sarah to the park so that we can enjoy it too.

On a totally random note...

It's amazing just how dirty your house gets when you're sick for three days. Sigh.

P.S. I would also like to take a minute to sing the praises of the schedule function on blogger without which there would not have been any posts this week. Thank you. 

Gotta love the classics.

In case you're new to this blog (Hi!) or haven't read some of my older posts, I work at a school (which I love, most of the time) and I also have to drive a school bus (which I don't love, most of the time).

This however, is one of those times that I did love driving the bus.

I was down to my last stop and had three boys who were still on, so it was fairly quiet (which is extremely unusual for the bus) when all of a sudden one of my little guys who is in first grade belts out with:

" Take me down to the paradise city
   where the grass is green 
   and the girls are pretty
   Oh won't you please take me hoooome!"

I'm tellin' you he did Axl Rose proud.

Spider!!!

This is what I almost ran into when I went to take the trash out the other night.

I know, I know, the picture is blurry. I really wish that I had gotten a good shot of the thing, it was huge.

The dang thing had strung a web from the edge of our gutter to a tiki torch on the other side of our patio. It must have been ten feet long.

The web, not the spider.

The spider itself was nothing to shake a stick at either though. If I had to guess, I would have to say that the body was about the size of a quarter. Shudder.

It's supposed to be red!

The other night I woke Sarah up to make her use the bathroom when I tucked Alex in. We've been having some, ahem, issues at night this last week.

Nothing serious, probably just her drinking too soon before bed, but I was very tired of stripping a soaking wet child (which I'm sure she was sick of) and bed in the middle of the night and washing all of her bedding, so I thought that I'd hedge my bets by making her get up and use the potty.

Well, when I picked her up out of bed she was apparently dreaming. Really hard.

Sarah: Red!
Me (very startled): What?
Sarah: It's red!
Me: What's red?
Sarah: It's supposed to be red!
Me: What's supposed to be red?
Sarah: It's supposed to be red!!!

At this point I gave up, she was very adamant that whatever it was was supposed to be red. Alex and I both started cracking up, and Sarah used the potty and went back to bed without a peep.

... And She Creeps

Last night Sarah and I were alone because Alex was spending the night at a friends house, and we always make these our 'girl's night.' It's nothing huge, but we hang out, cook, paint our nails, watch a movie Alex wouldn't be caught dead watching, things like that.

We usually have a really good time and enjoy being girly.

Well, I told Sarah to go get ready for bed while I finished some things up, and while I was walking towards her room to tuck her in I noticed that the lights were out.

Perfect. I could play 'And she creeps' with her.

This was a game that my mom used to play with me at bedtime when I was little that always involved lots of squealing and giggling. You hide under the covers while mom slowly creeps towards you saying, "Here she comes... and she turns... and she creeps... and she creeps..." walking as quietly as she can towards the bed until she pounces on you and tickles you. Tons of fun. 

So here I am playing the game and creeping into Sarah's room and she's giggling up a storm, when all of a sudden: 'gigglegiggle fart giggle fartfart giggle', and then of course I started cracking up...

It was priceless. 

Cooking, lots and lots of cooking.

 This:

 is my basil plant.

So this:

 was the todo list on the dry-erase board on my fridge today.

Alex is spending the night at a friend's house, so I thought that it would be a perfect time for Sarah and I to spend some time in the kitchen cooking together. So we both strapped on our aprons and got to work.  Here's the breakdown of what we ended up making:

• Pie crust ( for apple pies that I'm going to make next weekend from apples the kids and I picked with my mom)
• Pesto
• And Pinto/refried beans (these were a last minute addition, but they turned out yummy)

Sarah and I made the pie crust first. Now this was an experiment for me because I am inexplicably afraid of making my own pastry, but I'm tired of using Pillsbury and I wanted to try doing it from scratch this year (apple picking and pie making is an annual event in our house.)

So what's a girl to do? I opened up my trusty Pioneer Woman cookbook.

If you haven't heard of her yet  here's her website. Go ahead, check it out. I'll wait.

I know, cool huh? I've been reading her blog for a couple of years and have really enjoyed it, and I also love the recipes on her site. Anyway, so I followed her recipe for pie crust. It was really easy, and it's hanging out in the freezer right now. I'll pull it out tomorrow and bake some of it by the way of taste testing before I actually make pies with it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Next came the pesto, so Sarah and I went out on the back patio to pick the basil. My basil plant is up past my waist so I decided that it was high time to make pesto.

Here's a close up of it. Hello beautiful.

 

Here are some pictures of the process. 

                                    

 

I started with high hopes, but I'm not quite sure of the results. 

I'm not exactly a pesto expert, but I think that it turned out okay. I won't show you any pictures of the finished product though, I just couldn't find a way to make it not look, well, gross, and I'm not going to subject you to that. Aaaanyway, moving on. 

Here's the pinto beans, also a la Pioneer Woman, they turned out really, really good. I filled up four freezer containers with them. I left half of them whole and then mashed the other half to make refried beans. 

 And just because I love ya, here's a photo of my kitchen counter in the middle of everything.

Pumpkins! (Yes, I know they're early, we'll get into that later.)

Well, this Spring I decided that I was going to take back the godforsaken weed patch on the side of our house that used to be a garden. 

Here's the whole sad, sorry tale. 

I had picked up the book Square Foot Gardening (which is wonderful, I wholeheartedly recommend it) and promptly got the vegetable garden bug. Which as you know from this post, and this post, is not unusual for me. I have always wanted a garden, but the tiny postage stamp of a patio in our apartment in California prevented me from having one. After moving to North Carolina we had plenty of space, but then resources were a problem, go figure.

So, anyway, silly stupid me decides that it would be fun to involve the neighbors and kind of have a little community garden instead of just putting in a bed for the kids and I. 

Baaaaaaad idea. 

It was basically the cause of WWIII around our little patch of driveway. One neighbor wanted to plan things out very methodically and had some very expensive ideas on how we should do the garden, and the other neighbor wanted to have the garden in now, and I mean NOW because the planting season's getting late and we needed to get everything in the ground yesterday. Well, long story short, he won. 

Now, not only did he want the garden in NOW, he also wanted it to be huge. I was thinking maybe a couple of 4 x4 ft. beds, but noooooo, he rented a rototiller and dug out a ridiculously huge 12 x 30 ft. monster of a garden. Sigh. We had one growing season and then he and his family moved out, leaving me with the monster. The monster promptly overgrew with weeds because I couldn't keep up with it, and I'm not talking about little itty bitty weeds, no, I'm talking about weeds in excess of five feet tall. 

Some of them were over my head. 

No, I'm not kidding. I really wish that I was. 

So this eyesore sat on the side of my house for over a year, and I battled with it when I couldn't stand the sight of the weeds anymore. Finally this Spring I had had enough. I went out, pulled as many weeds as humanly possible, got free mulch from down the street at the tree cutting place, built two 4x4 ft. beds with Alex and Sarah, and put in our garden this Spring. 

Here are some shots of how it looks now. 

These morning glories showed up on their own. Aren't they gorgeous?

The two beds went at one end, and since we had this ridiculous amount of space left, I decided to grow pumpkins. I figured why the heck not. If they grow then cool, we have pumpkins. If not, I've lost a buck or two on pumpkin seeds, no big deal.

They grew, oh boy did they grow. The vines grew to over six feet long and it was super cool when the blooms and all of the baby pumpkins started showing up. Unfortunately I didn't lay the mulch down thick enough and all of the weeds came back. Those weeds overshadowed the pumpkins vines and caused all of them to rot. So, we had a pumpkin harvest in August. 

Gee, I hope they make it until Halloween, but in the meantime we have all of our little pumpkins in a row on our kitchen counter. How cool is that?

Forgotten how addicting this can be...

Must. stop. fiddling. 

I need to go to bed, work tomorrow.  

P.S. I love the changes that they've made to blogger since I've been gone. It's amazing what happens in a year... (coughcough) right, going to bed. 

P.P.S. I've also forgotten how incredibly frustrating it can be when you want to change something and you can't figure out how to do it. I'm really going to go get ready for bed now, I promise.

P.P.P.S. Yay, I figured it out! Okay, good night.  

On being a single mom and attemping to write a blog...

 Well, let's see, take single mom with blog (exhibit A), move her out of parent's house (exhibit B) and remove those sources of support (see exhibit B) and see what happens to her blog (exhibit C).

I've been reading back through my posts after not being on here for I don't even know how long and realized that I really miss doing this. I actually enjoyed reading my own writing ( I don't know what that says about me, I really promise that I'm not narcissistic) and I would love to get into doing this again.

It's neat to sort of chronicle this life that I'm living and to be able to look back at things I don't even remember months and years later. There are some precious memories in these archives, there are also some very painful ones. It's interesting to see how much I've changed, and how much I haven't. It's interesting to see how far I've come, and how far I still have to go.

Now I'm not promising anything (please see exhibits A, B, and C), but I hope that I might actually be able to make this work and stick to it this time (finances for internet permitting).

~ Jen