Mutt Monday

Boston, in her natural state.

Yes, that is an indentation in the ground under her bum and that line across the yard was caused by her and Hokie running back and forth.

Soup Saturday

Things are CRAZY at our house this time of year, especially since our Christmas guests are going to start arriving on the 17th--5 days! And with this being Joe's first Christmas, I want to make sure we (meaning me) have plenty of time to soak up the family time and not worry about cooking or chores. I'm splurging to have my house professionally cleaned and I'm stocking the freezer with lots of homemade soups for lunches.

Today I'm cooking up a beef & barley vegetable soup in the crockpot. It's fairly self-explanatory: beef, barley, carrots, green beans, onions, garlic, and whatever spices and herbs I have handy.



On the stove I have a new favorite cooking: butternut squash w/bacon soup. This soup proves the rule that you can add bacon to anything and my husband will eat it. But despite the tasty baconness, it's also low-calorie and nutritious. I can't find the original recipe I used, so I'll reproduce here.

Use 2 large halved butternut squashes with the pulp and seeds removed. Cook covered in the microwave in an inch of water for 15 minutes, until soft.

Meanwhile, cook 6-8 slices of bacon in a large pot and remove. Set aside for later. In the bacon grease, saute an onion and 3 cloves of garlic. Scoop out squash flesh and add to pot. Add enough water (or chicken stock, but this adds sodium and calories) to cover and let simmer until the flavors are blended. I usually take a potato masher to this to help integrate the flavors and break down the squash, but you can skip that.

Pour the soup into a large blender and pulse until smooth. If you will be freezing the soup, add the bacon back in so this gets chopped up into the soup. If serving immediately, then just crush the bacon on top of the soup.


This soup freezes so well and is very hearty. You can add things like cream or other seasonings to it when served, but I keep it simple to keep it diet-friendly. Yes, it's hard to imagine anything cooked in bacon grease as diet-friendly, but this is only 77 calories per 1-cup serving. Can't beat that!

Okay, back to the kitchen I go. Besides baking for gifts, I still need to stuff some peppers for the freezer and I'm running out of thyme!

Get it? Just a little kitchen dork humor for you.

Blue Light Special

The Watkins family considers itself to be somewhat "crunchy," "tree-hugging," "green," and any other dirt-implying adjective used to describe people who believe in global warming and not littering.

Okay. Maybe we take it a step farther. Yes, we use cloth diapers, make our own baby food, grow our own vegetables, recycle, compost kitchen scraps, buy energy star appliances, drive a hybrid. And yes, at Christmas we use LED lights.
Here's where I'm going to be brutally honest and say that I can't stand our Christmas lights. I cringe when I see them. Truly. Not only do they harshly clash with our lovely incandescent faux candles in the windows, but they really seem to make the cold nights colder. I mean, come on! We don't put hundreds of lights on our house to save money, we do it for purely aesthetic reasons! What is the point of stringing up lights you can stand to look at? Oh wait...the alternative is to have no lights up for Christmas because you don't want to be a yuletide hypocrite and string up energy-guzzling traditional lights? Um, that's not an option for me. I am nothing if not unapologetically and ruthlessly festive.

When we bought our lights last year, no stores in town carried the then-hard-to-find "warm white" LED strings. So we shrugged and bought the "cool white." The only two houses in our neighborhood decked out in the icy, bluish hues were ours and the electrician down the street. And of course, after laying out a ton of not-so-cool cash on lights, we couldn't just yank them down and rethink our commitment to the cause. Sure, THIS year all of the stores are now stocking the warm whites. Buy more lights, you say? Well while that might be feasible at the incandescent price of $1.99 per 100 lights, it's not so much at $11.99 per 60 LED lights. Bill promises me that next year we can save up and splurge on the warm whites, but this year it's blues or nothing. Besides, he says, we're making a statement!

And he's right. This year it looks like more folks have jumped on the enviro-friendly--albeit blueish--bandwagon as there are now THREE houses in our neighborhood with cool white LEDs and several more with colored LEDs (including one for-real blue LED house). Was it our awkwardly clashing and kind of ghoulish display last year that convinced them? Probably not. But I'm sure that, like me, once they saw that they wouldn't be the only weirdos on the block with an eye on the electric bill, it was slightly more okay. So after much inner turmoil and mind-changing, I decided to throw up the blue-tinted white flag and stick with the statement-making LEDs. For one more year.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go hug my trees and make another batch of granola.

Mutt Monday: Deck the Dogs

Hokie is all about some Christmas decorations.


Boston, not so much.


It doesn't help that Hokie got dibs on the pretty tree skirt and stuck Boston with the ugly garland.


Come on Boston, give us a smile. Don't you want to make it on the Christmas card this year?

The Feline Overlord even got in on the act...a little.

The Midnight Society of Applesauce

Who lurks in the shadows of the kitchen late at night, hunched over a bubbling cauldron? What is that intoxicating spicy sweet smell in the air? Why are all of the doorknobs sticky?

Ah, welcome to the the Midnight Society of Applesauce! You can find us peeling and chopping cheaply-wrought apples deep into the night, long after attention-demanding babies have retired to their cribs. Why do we toil into the wee hours, night after night, concocting these addictive brews?

Well when else do we have time? Applesauce making is a new hobby of mine, which is super convenient since applesauce eating is a favorite hobby of Joe's. Unfortunately, it takes several hours from peeling to canning, and it kind of has to be done without stopping; i.e., without baby. It's all worth it, though, because this tastes SO MUCH BETTER than the yellow goop you buy from the store.

We go through so much of it, so I don't make small batches here and there--I've been learning how to can my wares the old-fashioned way. I love PickYourOwn.org for canning instructions and all of the great advice (and gifted tools) from across the street at the One Acre Homestead.

So far this year I have made around 7 or 8 gallons of applesauce (I've lost track because we've been eating it along the way and using it for baking), canned in quart-sized jars and freezer containers. I don't have any dedicated canning tools yet, other than the gifted funnel and jar tongs from my sweet neighbor, but they are definitely on my wish list for Santa this year. For those of you who haven't canned before, it involves packing hot sauce into a hot jar and then submerging the jars in boiling water for a certain length of time.


I like to throw some cinnamon in when the sauce is cooking. You wouldn't believe how great this makes the house smell.



Needless to say, after an evening in the kitchen with all this steam, my skin looks fantastic. Once removed, the cool air outside the jar does some suction magic and the jars seal. They make an awesome "PING" sound when they're sealed up.

A magic potion? A mystical elixir? Freakin' delicious? You too can strive to join our secret society...or you can be really nice and I might share a jar.

Freezer!

Behold the awesome!

This, my friends, marks a new day in my kitchen, even though it is technically in the garage. All of the baking, meal assembling, and baby food making that I do can now actually be preserved long term! Probably the greatest Black Friday purchase we could have made.

Marvel in the energy-starryness of it all! I no longer need to worry about stuffing everything we harvest into an already crammed side-by-side freezer (hate!).

I haven't even had time to pull the tape off of it or set up the lovely shelves (so many!) into the door, but I had to christen it with what will be our Christmas dinner in a few weeks:

Bask in the 20 cubic feet of glorious zero-degree air! That is a giant pork loin, friends. Look at it just languishing in there like a teenager in a rented prom limo. No longer are you forcing me to rearrange every thing in the door of my crummy tiny freezer every time I try to close it!

I don't usually get this excited about appliances, but I'm a little jazzed about this one.

Fruit flies, don't bother me!

*I'm working on a few posts about recent activities around the ranch since we got home from our trip (including an absent Mutt Monday--sorry, gotta upload the photos), but in the meantime this is a post I started before we left.



This guy.
Who does he think he is? Why does he think it's cool to invite 30 or so of his best friends to come and keep me company in my kitchen? (FYI, the google images search for this guy is going to give me nightmares.)

The ugly truth about this whole organic/crunchy/homegrown/diy lifestyle that we're trying to lead is that much of what we do around the kitchen draws these little critters like...well...flies. We've got tons of kitchen scraps from making everything from scratch (eggshells, peels, veggie refuse, etc.) We use those scraps in our compost pile, which gets started in our cute little kitchen compost crock. We have a 9-month-old who sprinkles little bits of food ALL OVER THE PLACE when he eats. Seriously, I found a cheerio in one of my socks.

Basically our kitchen is the holy grail for fruit flies. This often leads to me keeping the windows shut tighter than Fort Knox, but every once in a while a beautiful afternoon breeze will tempt me into opening, ever so slightly, one of the kitchen windows.....then BAM. Dozens of fruit flies.

And guess what, folks? You can't smash them. Not only do they move at a hauntingly slow pace and in unpredictable floaty pattern, they are so darn small and light that they are normally gently pushed out of the way by the air current I make as I frantically try to crush them with whatever is handy. So what's the solution? Trapping them.
This was my first attempt at a trap, made from an old salad dressing jar, some chardonnay (I'm more of a pinot grigio girl), and dish detergent. The theory is that the bugs lean in to drink the wine and are poisoned by the soap. Or something. They mostly slip in and drown, which is fine by me.
The next method I tried was suggested by my friend, Lacey. Similar 3-ingredient set up, this time with a mason jar, apple cider vinegar, and a rolled up piece of paper. The idea is that the little idiots fly merrily down the cone and into the jar, and then freak out a bunch when they can't figure out how to get out. More drowning, more satisfaction on my part.
I found that a recycled page from one of my freelance jobs worked nicely. It was a 5th grade math workbook that I proofread. Combining my old hatred for fractions with my hatred for fruit flies? Sheer beauty.

As nice as these traps look on my counter, I'd really rather not need them at all. Does anyone out there have an end-all-be-all solution for these nasty house guests?

*Update: upon our return from Thanksgiving, it appears as if we had won the war. Lots of casualties, no live hostages. Yes!