How To Can Chicken, for Caryn.

(click on pic to enlarge)

An Artist's Sketch of My Day

Because my camera is kaput. That's why. And we have been up to important things. Really important. Like the whole blogger world should know about my chicken venture. (Canning forty pounds of chicken. It sounded like a good idea, Rachel!) Anyone have any good chicken jokes? I'd love to hear them.

Caramel Apple Sopaipilla Cheesecake Bars

So...have you ever tried Sopaipilla Cheesecake Pie??Cheesecake. Cinnamon. Buttery, flaky crust. Crisp cinnamon and sugar topping.
You are missing out, seriously, if you haven't. Go HERE for the recipe.
And then try my variation...the addition of cut up apples sprinkled with cinnamon and these delightful little buggers:So yum. So almost fall. It made my house smell like all of those wonderful autumn things...apple cider, brisk air, changing leaves...
Here is how I did the variation:
After putting the cream cheese mixture on the crescent dough, put 1-2 diced apples (depending on your taste) and then sprinkle with 3/4 cup Kraft Caramel bits. Cover with remaining crescent dough and follow the rest of the recipe.
Mmm Mmm Good.
Let me know what you think.

On Yellow

It happened. What I'd been dreading since the first day of school.
Bekah's class has a green-yellow-red behavior system. All the kids start school everyday on green. If they have to be warned twice about something, then they go to yellow. If they continue to be disruptive then they go to red and their parents are called.
Here's the kicker...if they stay on green all week then on Friday they get to pick something out of the treasure box. Bekah shows me her green stamp everyday, and she tells me all of the kids that had to go to yellow and what happened.
Like the kid that spit on someone. He went to red.
I went to pick Bekah up yesterday and when she saw me she instantly melted. Dissolved into tears. A little puddle. She was so sad! But she told me she couldn't remember why she went to yellow.
Later on at home I told her that she could tell me what happened or she could wait for Daddy to come home and tell him.
Puddle time again.
"I'll tell you! I don't want daddy to come home and say 'Bekah'! I don't want him to ask me about it! I'll tell it to you and you can tell him!"
So the story goes that there was a boy in class who wouldn't show his picture he drew to anyone else. Bekah apparently told him that no one would like his picture. Not very nice. And bam, the little paper version of Bekah moved up to yellow.
I kept my promise and told Rus myself, out of range of little yellow ears.
What did we learn from this?
Now at the insistence of Bekah we have our very own green-yellow-red system in our house so we can practice. We have a little Jacob, Bekah, Beau, Mommy, Daddy, and even Bekah's bear, Kristy. We have the rules written next to each pocket, and if you stay on green all week you get a dollar.
I'm not sure how I feel about it yet, we'll see!

Tent Rocks, and a link to our new Adventure Blog!

Rus and I decided to do some more exploring this weekend. Jacob agreed, as long as he got to bring his sword. It was for the bears. Yep. Bear country. Jacob was our protector. We decided to head up to Tent Rocks in the Cochiti Pueblo. It is north of us between Albuquerque and Santa Fe.
We hiked about a half mile and Jacob decided he really needed a rest.
That was when Rus said he saw a bear just rounding the corner of the trail in front of us.
There were arrows marking the trail and we convinced Bekah and Jacob that the bear had left the arrows for us to show us where he went. Those arrows took us into a beautiful sandstone slot canyon...sandstone walls coming up on both sides, brush growing in odd places, and an incredibly tall ponderosa whose roots had been completely exposed so that you could walk under the tree. Bekah's favorite part of the trail was where a huge boulder had blocked the path and you had to crawl under it to continue on.
We covered over three miles through that beautiful scenery minus a bear, and just finally making it back to the truck seemed to counter-act the disappointment of never actually seeing that darn elusive bear.
Our camera broke a while back and the one we borrowed for our last trip had been returned, so Rus and I were both sincerely regretting not having a camera for this hike. So I have taken the liberty of, um, borrowing a pic from the google image search... I also wanted to announce that Rus and I have started our own Adventure journal/blog. We have posted several of our old trips, complete with pictures, maps, and directions...We want those of you who live here to have a resource for awesome places to take your families, and we want to convince the rest of you that your lives will not be complete if you don't come visit this amazing state.
Our blog is www.nmadv101.blogspot.com
We are hoping to explore all over New Mexico so that we can eventually have 101 different adventures on our blog!
We hope you enjoy it and definitely hope you will give us your feedback about how the site looks and if the descriptions and directions are clear.
Just a note...Rus and I are doing this blog together, meaning he actually posts a lot of the content, so if the spelling is bad or the writing isn't quite as elaborate, you know it's him! (Love you, hon!)

Stargirl

I got swept off my feet by a wonderful little book today,
Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli.
Have you read it?
Let's just say that it embodies the wonderful idea of non-conformity.
Of having vision and not caring if your vision is not like every one else's.
And then suddenly caring.
And then realizing that worrying what every one else thinks doesn't really change anything.
Changing yourself to fit it doesn't put more rocks in your wagon.
Or get you the guy in the end.

Reading it made me want to do little wonderful nice things for everyone.
And read the newspaper more often.
And buy Rus a porcupine necktie.

Quirky.
You should check it out.

Garden Volunteers

Rus decided that we should make our own compost. So he bought a big black plastic trash can and drilled holes all over it. Then he filled it with some dirt. Then he placed a lovely little bucket in the house right by the kitchen sink, for me. I fill up that bucket daily, he adds it to the compost bin daily (or else it stinks up our kitchen/house) and thus the world goes round. Every month or so he'll take a shovel, move stuff around in the trash can, and if he's lucky enough to find wonderful rich black dirt at the bottom of the bin, he'll distribute it among our garden.
Such was the story back in May when we started our garden. We planted everything from seed...an experiment to see what would really grow. We planted romaine lettuce, spinach, corn, carrots, basil, okra, roma tomatoes, green chiles, watermelon, cilantro, cucumbers, and...I think that's it. Then we fertilized it with our compost that had been...um...composting since last summer.
We watered everything.
The sun shone.
Stuff sprouted.
Everywhere.
And by that I mean everywhere. Stuff that we hadn't planted. We called them volunteers. The main volunteers were basil, watermelon, a wonderful canteloupe plant, a potato plant, and a couple of green chile plants. We also had a funky red flower sprout up faithfully along every inch of our drip hose on one of the garden beds. I don't know what it's called, but I like the color!
So here, take a tour around our garden (caption above each pic)...My Mother's day flowers which are thriving. Go Rus! The tall plants with the flowery tops are my romaine lettuce. They are out of control. And while we did enjoy them for about two whole months, they are now in fact kind of bitter tasting. The heat does that to them.The tree in the corner is our peach tree. It is also thriving. There are strawberries beneath it with beautiful little runners sending little baby plants all over the place. Behind that tree is the canteloupe plant and a huge volunteer tomato plant (in the shadow to the right). (Which incidentally has yet to produce any tomatoes. Very Suspicious.)See those pretty red plants? And the mass of tomato plants? And the watermelon spilling off to the left side?And here we did plant that tomato plant on the right, but it was supposed to be a container size cherry tomato plant, not a huge obtrusive yummy monster like it is.
The basil on the bottom left? Volunteer.
Watermelon in the top right? Volunteer.Hi rabbits! Please don't make babies...I'm not ready!This watermelon started before we built the playhouse and Rus was sure it would die. It didn't, and the one watermelon it has produced was delicious. The plant should be proud to be the baby of a seed that someone spit.Some of the bountys from our garden are seven quarts of pickles, 3 1/2 pints of diced tomatoes with basil (and one with green chile) and three eight-ounce freezer jars of pesto. Yum. We're on a roll and lovin' it!