Pickle Me This!

We grew "pickling cucumbers" this year... so we had planned for this moment since early last spring. Here at last!

We had also planned to try out canning for the first time with these pickles, but realized we were missing one piece of the equipment we needed.... so with cukes already sliced I hopped online to quickly find a Refrigerator Pickle recipe. This one looked tasty and used ingredients I already had - perfect!

Spices in - Check!

Cukes and onions sliced, salted, and iced - check!
(Why iced? I don't know but I followed the directions.]
Combine everything in the pot - check!

Scoop 'em into jars and admire our work - check!

Unfortunately, we didn't love the taste of these pickles -sad face- so I wouldn't recommend the recipe. But with a couple pounds of sliced cukes staring us in the face I had to find a recipe FAST. Sometimes you win... sometimes not. But they sure do look delicious in this post, don't they?

What's better than a campfire?

How do you make a campfire even better? Three ways.

1. Friends.

2. Dinner cooked over the campfire.

You can improve on #2 by cooking your food IN the bun (be it wrapped in dough, or in a traditional hot dog bun].

3. Some seriously good tunes.

Had a great time with you Brodsky -Thanks for rockin' out with us.

Dreaming of Pizza

I've got a hankering for pizza... BIG pizza!

I'm sure a visit to our old stomping grounds, Pat's Pizza, in the near future will hit the spot, but right now I'm thinking about these GIANT, delicious pizzas we had when we visited Matt a few weeks ago... (asparagus and prosciutto on a pizza - seriously tasty!}No one likes puny slices anyways!

A bushel of apples.... maybe

What's the one thing that ushers in fall and makes you forget how much you're going to miss tank tops and flip flops? Apple picking. So Brian and I made our annual trek to the local apple orchard to pick bushels of apples. You got a big trunk? 'Cause I'm going to put my apples in it!

When we got there, there were tons of people mulling around. But the orchard dude told us "People are generally picking dropped apples to use for baking since there's none on the trees." What?!?! We planned this trip WEEKS earlier than last year, but still no apples?! This orchard got hit with some frost in mid May that took out 85-90% of their crop -eeek! But we were determined to find some apples to pick.

Plenty of the apples on the ground...

Woo Hoo - our first apple!

Whoa - two on one tree!

I found one over here! But don't get too close, this one's mine.It took a while, but we got about 20 apples in our bag. And that might have very well stripped the entire orchard of it's on-tree apples!

Quick! Escape with those apples, before anyone else sees them!
And the reward for our hard work was Apple Stuff - the famous Blueberry Stuff, but with apples - Yumm!!

Genetically Engineered Animals

If the idea of genetically engineered veggies makes you uneasy (especially since we're already eating it) then GE-salmon should make you squirm. The FDA is reviewing whether to approve one company's genetically engineered salmon right now. These fish get extra growth hormone trigger-genes to make them grow to market size twice as fast; might not seem like a big deal, but studies already show that growth hormones linger in the meat and milk of animals given it.... which may increase a whole bunch of health risk factors. Plus, talk about some growing pains!
So what I'm trying to say is if super-fast-growing fish on your dinner plates weirds you out, feel free to let Obama know how you feel! Here's one way: Send him an email

Go on, do it now! You know it'll feel good. Besides, you and Obama really need to catch up on stuff anyways...