A Blessed Day!

Today was a day of eye opening and a day to be truly thankful. Our parents where subject of a scam and we are thankful that all has ended well. PLEASE watch out for your family and extended family, especially the elderly in our community. This generation can be very susceptible to fraud and to scams, they were taught to live by the "golden rule" and they believe that everyone else was taught the same. PLEASE especially now that winter is approaching us in the North East check on your neighbors.

I truly hope that today has found you and your family happy, safe and loved!

Back to Work Monday!

It was back to work today! The good news is it's a really short work week, only 3 days, but the reality is that it's going to be 3 really long days!! I keep reminding myself that at the end of these three days comes 4 wonderful family filled days of cooking, holding grand babies (all but 1 of them will be home for Thanksgiving) and I can bury myself in my sewing room for 2 entire days!! Talk about a girl's dream come true, well at least one of my dreams! Once the cooking and cleaning is done on Thursday I get to figure which one of my projects I want to work on the most! Will it be a wonderful Christmas quilt designed by CrabApple Hill Designs or will I practice my knitting or shall I have fun organizing all of my projects? I'll let you know what i decide!! It really does sound like fun, now i just need to make it through the next 2 days!!

I hope everyone had a wonderful Monday!

M

AppleSauce!

We were blessed with fantatic weather today.  The temps were in the low 60's for most of the day which is unheard of this time of year for us.  Bob was busy stacking wood for the winter and I kept myself busy in the house getting ready for Thanksgiving dinner.  The kids love homemade applesauce so I figured that was one of the items I could get made today.  We are blessed in the fact that behind our home is 90+ acres of apples and the orchards have been picked but not picked clean!  The owner of the orchard is a friend of our so we've obtained permission to pick what is left once they have finished up for the season.  Bob and I took a short ride on the 4 wheeler and got a couple bushels of apples, one for apple sauce and one for pies.

I had meant to make enough applesauce for dinner on Thursday but think I got a little carried away.  We really like applesauce made from Empire apples.  I could not believe how many Empires there still were in the orchard!

The first thing I always do is wash them good, I really want to make certain that they are good and clean prior to getting them ready to cut up. Here's a picture of my sink full of Empire Apples!! Look good hugh???

We have a fantastic "old" gadget that is my mother-in-laws that we use to speed up the pealing and cutting process.  It's great, hooks right to one of the cutting boards and all we have to do is crank the wheel and the apples are peeled and cut up at once!  A little warning here, it can be a little messy so we actually open the dishwasher door and do the peeling with the dishwasher open, saves peels and juice from dripping on the floor.

Here's a nice shot of the mess I'm making, but the mess is so worth it!

I love this shot!  See how nice and evenly the apple is sliced?

I use a really large pan with a thick bottom to cook the apples in and most recipes I found called for adding a lot of water, for this large pot (it's 12 quarts) I only used 2/3 of a cup of water. 

I simmered them for a couple of hours.  Here's a shot of them almost done:

They really cook down fast.  The pot was amost filled to the top when I started and at this point the pot is now about half full.  See the chunks still of apples?  Some people like it this chunky and others like to add sugar and cinnamon, I don't add either.  There are a couple of reason I don't add anything to my applesauce, the first is I've got grandkids and they really don't need the extra sugar plus this makes great babyfood for the wee little ones we've got in our family. I let it simmer for about another hour or so until the bulk of the chunks were gone.  Once it's cooled off I put it into a container that is freezer save and my job is done.  Another thing off my cooking list for Thanksgiving Day!  The homemade applesauce is ready for the kids!

Hope you and your family had a great Sunday!

Christmas Coasters!

My daughter & I started making Christmas presents today for Austin's Pre-K teachers and Maggie's other grandparents and are THRILLED on how they are coming out!  Our plan is to make 4 4" coaster, 1 7" hot plate, two pot holders and two dish towels for everyone on this list.  We've started with the coasters and the pot holders (my next blog will feature how to make the pot holders), here's how we did the coasters:
 
These are the supplies we used:
20 beverage size napkins (when we opened them we realized that we had two different designs so we cut the napkins into quarters on the folds)
20 dinner size napkins (we did the same thing with the dinner napkins as we did with the beverage napkins)
bottle of Modge Podge
4" (approximate size) plain tiles (purchase at a "seconds" store)
1 can of spray Modge Podge sealer
Cork (cut 1/8" smaller than the tiles)
Glue to adhere the Cork to the tiles

Following the directions on the Modge Podge we coated the tiles and then placed the napkins on the tacky tiles, smoothed them out and let them sit until they were dry.  It took 3 more  coats of the Modge Podge letting the tiles dry between each coating.  Once we were done with the Modge Podge and the tiles were completely dry we then coated each tile with the Modge Podge sealer, the final step was to adhere the Cork to the back of the tiles.  You can use any type of glue you want, we used an spray adhesive.

Let me know what you think!  Personally I think they are great!