So I managed to score a couple of extra days off here at the beginning of December (okay, I had put in for them in January, but I was happy they were still on the schedule come December), and I had a list longer than Santa's of stuff I wanted to get done. First was finishing all my Christmas knitting, and with one last project to cinch close and weave in the ends of the yarn, Check! Second was to decorate indoors and turn it into a Christmas wonderland, and after putting the ornaments on the artificial trees that had stood for two days barren but for their lights, Check!
Third was to get all the presents I wanted ordered online, and Paypal put up a pretty good fight on this one, so I still have some gifts left to purchase. Fourth was Christmas cookies!! And we are still working on this one too. We've made 3 different kinds so far and hopefully we'll get to number 4 tomorrow. So, by request, here are the cookies.
Our first attempt was Lemon Semolina cookies. They turned out kinda cake-y and if we had followed the directions and refrigerated them, they might have been more like the recipe described. We have so many leftover lemons (thank you Costco!) that even with Mom making a batch of lemon curd, we probably will give this one another try.
Lemon Semolina Cookies
2 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup butter, softened (1 stick)
2 Tblsp olive oil
2/3 cup semolina (you can find it by the flour, we used Bob's Red Mill brand)
1 cup granulated sugar, plus some for rolling
2 large eggs
2 lemons grated for zest and juiced
2 Tblsp limoncello (that's right some lemon liqueur)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
Heat oven to 325 degrees. Cream butter, olive oil, and 1 cup sugar. Add eggs, lemon zest, juice from zested lemons, limoncello and vanilla. Mix until well blended. Add baking powder, baking soda, and salt and continue to blend. Add in flour and semolina. Mix into a nice batter and refrigerate 1 hour. Grease cookie sheet (or spray with Pam) and scoop up some dough to make a 1 inch ball. Roll into ball and then roll in a bowl of granulated sugar and place on cookie sheet. Bake until the centers collapse and crinkle and edges are golden brown, 14 to 18 minutes.
The next new cookie we tried was Mint Chocolate Crinkles. And these were winners. I shouldn't take the credit for those, it was all Martha, so here's a link to the recipe. I couldn't find it on Martha Stewart's website, but King Arthur Flour is where we got the Dutch cocoa (and it was worth it!) so at least it takes you to the right place. We ended up baking them for 22 minutes, but that was our oven, so follow her directions and yours should be just as tasty.
The latest cookies are good old tried and trues in my family. Betty Peterson's Butter Cookies. The batter alone could be a food group. When I was a child I would eat, raw mind you, the leftovers from Mom cutting them into shapes. And I'm still working on getting that weight off. :) The recipe came from my Mom's Girl Scout leader Betty Peterson. I still hear about all the wonderful things that came out of her kitchen and though many of those recipes are lost we are lucky enough to have this one written in the back of a Betty Crocker cookbook that looks like it should be in the Smithsonian. Since I'm in the Christmas spirit I'll save you the eyestrain of trying to read it off of the picture and give you the recipe. You can frost these if you like, or just let them sit around and let the vanilla mature in them a couple of days until they can be eaten plain.
Betty Peterson's Butter Cookies
3 cups flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup butter, softened (2 sticks)
1 egg
3 Tblsp cream (or half and half, or milk)
1 Tblsp vanilla
Heat oven to 375 degrees. Cream butter, sugar and vanilla. Add egg and cream and mix until well incorporated. Add in salt and baking powder and blend well. Add in flour slowly, letting the blender mix it into the batter before adding more. If your batter is too sticky to roll, add in small amounts of flour until you can work with it. On a clean generously floured surface roll out dough and cut with your favorite cookie cutters. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes until edges are golden brown.
So I haven't blogged in a long time, and part of that was due to my computer. It would take forever to load and forever to do pretty much anything. The Internet Explorer couldn't update to the newest version because I was still running Windows XP. The Google Chrome I installed would give me an error message when I tried logging into Blogger, a Google website. I would then have to traverse through my main blog page and voila! I was signed in. Google Chrome also had issues with security certificates for some websites, including my banking website. You would wait and wait for it to give you an option to "reload" the website, then it would take you there. I couldn't redeem any iTunes gift cards through iTunes, but could through the Apple website, then even that stopped working. I had gotten Sims 3 from a friend and it would take years to load and then not work too well because I had such an old video card. Pretty much my computer was just sitting there collecting dust. The final straw was when I tried to defrag the hard drive and Windows said "Unable to defrag volume," while showing me a whole bunch of red fragmented files on the drive. It was like hearing that your computer has cancer and only six months left to live.
So then one day I get a call. It's Santa.
"Carrie, I haven't seen any blogs from you lately. What's up?"
"Well Santa, my computer is acting stupid and I don't want to struggle with getting my pictures on there, so I can then take them to my netbook and blog them."
"Your computer huh? Do you need a new tower?"
"Yeah, I could do with just a new tower. Something slick with 1 TB of hard drive and 8 GB of memory. Something I wouldn't have to worry about for another 6 years or so."
"That does sound nice. But you know you were saying you hated it being so slow. You know what's fast and has all that nice stuff you were talking about? I hear they also last longer than 6 years."
"I think your talking about a Mac. Those are really expensive aren't they?"
"It's all we use up here at the North Pole. Lemme see what I can do."
And what do you know but a few days after Thanksgiving this appeared on my porch.
Okay, I'm kidding about the Santa part, though I do hear it's only Macs up at the North Pole. I've been researching computers for about a year. I looked at a couple of towers and then I saw this review on Cnet that compared computer speeds and the Mac blew them all out of the water. So then I started dreaming. And then I started scheming. I looked at all the Mac options and decided that the iMac was the best deal for what I wanted. And then I started saving. My savings account has been taking a pretty bad hit, but it was worth it. I also rationalized that if I could save $1,000 for a new tower, I could save another $800 more for a Mac. I'm still working my way on becoming fluent on my new Mac and enjoying it. So though Santa wasn't really involved, it still feels like Christmas a bit earlier than usual.
We have been busy all month getting our garden all harvested and canning all those yummy tomatoes for later this winter. Around the middle of October I felt like the nights were getting a bit too chilly and Mom and I went out after work one night and got in all the tomatoes, squash, pumpkins and peppers that were left.
We picked 6 bags of tomatoes (red and green), a bag of onions (we already had taken one bag out of the garden earlier), a bag of small peppers, 10 sugar pumpkins (for canning), 5 large carving pumpkins, a dozen baby pumpkins (for decorating), 2 large Hubbard squash, 20 small acorn and butternut squash and another 2 or 3 cucumbers. Congrats to our long raised beds we put in this spring, you produced 3 or 4 times what we got last year! We have been spending most of our free time trying to can and preserve all those tomatoes. I have already made one huge stockpot full of pureed tomatoes into sauce and we have put up around 40 pints of stewed tomatoes. And there are still three bags left!
Mom has also been canning the sugar pumpkins for pies and baking later. As if we didn't have enough to try and preserve a co-worker mentioned they had concord grapes if anyone wanted to pick them. So another night after work Mom and I went out and picked a box full. He also had an apple tree laden with Macintosh's so we picked a box of those too. I tell you I have probably been eating apples and peanut butter for lunch for about two weeks, but it's still so good every day. I spent one afternoon de-steming the grapes and picking out any bad ones and ended up with 3 bowls full. Mom mashed them down and got the juice out of them and we'll be trying our hand at some grape jelly pretty soon here. We aren't usually the grape jelly kind of people, but everything tastes better homemade, right? I'm sure I can find some takers on Facebook if we don't want to eat it all....
On the other side of things we finally got a rug for the living room and it's so pretty!! Unfortunately the cats think so as well and have been sticking their claws all over it. :( Whatevs, it still is pretty and now the living room feels homey again.
For those of you not in Washington, fall is officially here. I had to scrape frost off my window last week (only once and it was real thin...but still....really?) and we have been firing up the pellet stove most evenings. Luckily the days are still really wonderful, sunny and warm, but you can tell the summer heat is gone and won't be back for a good 7 or 8 months. Yea for fall!
Everyone's last bit of summer should be spent at a beach. Our choice, of course, is Cannon Beach and three weeks ago we spent our last bit of summer there.
On Saturday Mom and I drove down to the coast and the weather was perfect! No clouds in the sky, warm temps, barely a breeze...and everyone else thought so too. Because of this...
We met this 10 miles out of Astoria...
Yeah, apparently everyone else thought it would be a good idea to head to the beach. I told Mom I thought this happened last year too. So next year we will be going on Tuesday to avoid the weekend traffic jams. It was stop and go and we were stuck in it for about an hour. It turns out there was an accident and that's what started the backup, but still, we're avoiding the weekends next year.
When we did make it to Cannon Beach we took a nice long walk in what would be the best weather of the trip. We rounded up the night with dinner at Bill's Tavern and were even recognized as returnees. The server remembered us after we ordered Blackberry Beauty beers as well as some root beer.
On Sunday we got up and headed into town for some shopping. We headed over to Sesame and Lilies first for some soap, enough to keep us tided over until next March. Then we headed down to Coastal Yarns and I got another couple of sets for baby sweaters along with a new book of patterns by Sirdar. Mom got some single balls for baby hats and booties out of the same book. Then we picked up donuts and headed back to the car. I hadn't heard from Nicole, who was meeting us there for a couple of days with just the girls. I called her husband Tony because I had written down her cell number and then promptly left it next to the computer at home. The cell reception is terrible everywhere but the beach, but he managed to get me the number. Apparently Nicole had called him earlier for the same thing...peas in a pod are we not? I finally got a hold of her and she was in the parking lot at the hotel. So Mom and I headed back and met her there. We got her stuff into the room and asked her if she was hungry? Of course! So we all piled into the van and went back into town to have lunch at Morris' Fireside Restaurant. After making it back to the hotel we settled in and caught up while trying to keep Emily from being too afraid of the dogs...and likewise from the dog's point of view.
The next day we started off our day going to the fabric store, Center Diamond. I picked up a new bag pattern and picked out some fabric to make it up with and had Nicole do the same. Then we went to town and back to the yarn store and I got another set of yarn for a hat and scarf set. We also had Nicole pick out some donuts and we went to lunch at Bill's again because Nicole had to try the beer. We went back to the room and had a nice walk on the beach, even though it was cloudy. Then Nicole and I sat on the beach and Emily played with her sand toys.
That evening we all went over to Wayfarer's Restaurant and we had a reserved table by the window. We had calamari and clams and mushroom ravioli and Caesar salad and a whole bottle of white zinfindael. Even Emily liked the deep fried calamari, though she didn't know what it was. After dinner we went over to the pool and played there for a while. Mom hung out in the hot tub and Nicole and I jumped in there right at the end. Emily has a lot of fun playing in the pool, though she tried many times to get out of Nicole's grasp. That kiddo needs swimming lessons for sure!
The next day we drove into Seaside and again did a little shopping. We stopped at the Croc store and I got Emily a little pair of Crocs with fuzzy lining which are so cute! We also went to the Under the Big Top toy store and Emily enjoyed the wooden train set they had out.
We ate at Pig 'n Pancake and then drove back to Cannon Beach to go to their farmer's market. We got vanilla pudding and blackberries and raspberries. They had cookies and other yummy bread treats. The day had turned sunny and warm, but we all really wanted to go to the Tillamook Cheese Factory. So we piled back into the car and drove down 101 to Tillamook. We went up and watched cheddar being packed from huge bricks into baby loaf and 8 oz. packages.
Then we shopped in the store and got lots of tasty cheese, cheese curds and cheese spread. We also got ice cream of course.
And had our pictures taken in the baby loaf van.
Then we drove back to Cannon Beach and managed to catch the last light of a sunny day with an excellent walk to Haystack rock and back.
The next day Nicole had to go back home. Her and Emily left in the morning for the long drive back to Medford. Meeting up every year is definitely something we'll have to make a tradition out of. There are lots of places to see! That day Mom and I lazed around mostly. We knit, we watched movies, we walked the beach and we ate all we could so we didn't have to pack it all home. Ultimately we were pretty boring. But all vacations must come to an end and we packed it all up that afternoon since we were returning home the next day. As we drove home on Thursday the leaves were turning and the chill of autumn was in the air. It was time to get home and pick tomatoes and pumpkins and squash and can it and freeze it and pack it away for the winter.
