pumpkins and apples

what a fantastic weekend we just had!!! it was a fun fall celebration all around. good friends from portland and my cousin jim and his family made it up for the festivities.

first we went up to rasmussen farms pumpkin patch (sadly this may be the last year for the farm as the owners are retiring). the kids had a great time picking out their pumpkins, running through the corn maze and playing on the tractor.






then back home we borrowed a cider press and pressed some apples! it was so. much. fun!!! a few warm cider barn burners to drink and everyone was having a great time.

....my friend camille cranking the press

....the kids checking out the yummy juice coming out

....my turn with camille's husband reuben working the crank

....my cousin jim and his wife megan (who by the way has two little kids, is 7mo pregnant with #3 and is still working the cider press... she rocks!)


so some of that cider made it's way into buckets to be fermented into hard cider (under the direction of my wine making friends camille and reuben) .....we are looking forward to a little something to warm our evenings this winter.


....and then to finish off an already fabulous weekend we also made our traditional halloween monster cookies!! yum!

seriously good times!!!!

canning madness

we are in the midst of a full force canning madness right now!! we had a very cool summer (and thus not a great harvest). typically most of our canning would be done by now usually by the end of aug or early sept. we did an mid-summer jam can (blueberry, raspberry, strawberry jams) in july and not much since (though i have been freezing any vegetables we harvested in the meantime so it wasn't a complete loss).

now with the frost looming we had to throw in the towel and finally pull what tomatoes we had and put up what we could. todd's mom judy came out to visit last weekend and got caught up in processing tomatoes for sauce (bless her heart she just dove right in coring and chopping). even with our paltry harvest we managed to put up some salsa, pizza sauce and plain old canned tomatoes.

we also canned a fair bit more green than red this year. in addition to canning the typical dilly beans (just delicious in a good bloody mary), we also for the first time put up some pickled green tomatoes and some green tomato chutney this year (we had to do something with all those green tomatoes!!!). and last but not least some salsa verde with the tomatillo harvest and the chiles.

now this time of year we normally are canning our pears (which is why with the summer harvest and the fall harvest all going into cans in the last couple of week i can truly call it a canning madness).... we canned two batches of pear butter, plain old pears in simple syrup, and for the grownups some pears in brandy....yummm!

thankfully i think we are near the end of our canning craze....maybe with all our 'extra' time we can actually finish painting our house...and the garlic needs to get in the ground...and... and.. and...needless to say life continues to be busy on our homestead in the hood.