PEPPER SAUCE
The garden is almost done for this year so I am busy cooking up a storm to try and preserve as much of our produce as possible. One of my favorite things to make is a homemade pepper hot sauce. I use the recipe for "
Sweep the Kitchen Hot Sauce" on the website
Date Night Doins BBQ For Two (click
here to go to the website and
here for the recipe). I found this recipe several years ago and it has always turned out good. You can tweak it to your own taste because it is just a basic recipe for hot sauce. I changed it up a bit this year by adding a couple of carrots to the mix. It is simmering right now and is making the whole house smell delicious! I can't wait for it to get done so I can taste it.
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| Sweep the Kitchen Hot Sauce |
POTATOES!
This past week Linda and I got out into the garden and started digging up our potatoes. I planted 20 potato plants this year, so we figured it was going to be quite a job to dig them all up. By now they have almost all turned brown so we know they are ready to dig up. We got through about half of the plants and were pleasantly surprised to find that we got about 5-6 large potatoes from each plant. Half of our plants were Yukon Gold potatoes and the other half were Red Potatoes. We found that the Red Potato plants had about 6 large potatoes under them and sometimes we would get a few small (new) potatoes. When we were halfway through the plants we decided to stop because our backs were starting to hurt. It is hard work, digging up potatoes! You have to make the hole wider than the plant so you can be sure not to cut through any potatoes under the ground. And we found that we had to dig down about a foot to find the potatoes underneath the plants. But our potato count for getting halfway through was 55 potatoes! We put them on newspaper in the tub in our guest bathroom so they could cure. The first thing I did was make some potato salad with the few that had cut marks. Or, as we say back South, "tater salad." It was delicious, made more so by the fact that it was our homegrown potatoes.
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| The first bucket full we dug up |
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| The complete haul from our first digging |
CHOCOLATE ZUCCHINI BREAD
The other day I had seven large zucchini staring me in the face and I knew I needed to do something with some of them. As soon as I get rid of a couple of them I discover I have three more to pick in the garden! But things have slowed down a bit so I am slowly catching up. There is one way to use up zucchini that I have always wanted to try and that is by making zucchini bread. So I gathered all the ingredients for Chocolate Zucchini Bread (click
here for the recipe) from the website
Inspired Taste.
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| Looks good enough to eat already! |
You can't imagine how good this recipe is. It's called "bread" but let's face it, folks...it's cake. Does that look like bread to you? Decide for yourself.
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| Chocolate Zucchini Cake |
TEN YEARS AGO
Linda and I are continuing to celebrate our ten-year anniversary of being in Yakima. Every weekend during our drinkie-poo time (aka "
cocktail hour"), I read an excerpt from my journal that I kept during that time. Here is a picture of my journal entry from September 15, 2007.
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| Journal Entry 09/15/07 |
We have also been looking at some of our video discs from back then as well. It is so nice to have the journal entry I read coincide with a video we just watched. It reminds us of how excited we were to be on a new adventure, moving to an area very different from where we both used to live. Yakima is worlds away from California and North Carolina in so many ways, and we have only begun to explore the many possibilities that this area of the country offers for recreation and entertainment. Now that we are retired, we are trying to regain some of that enthusiasm from ten years ago. We now have the time to revisit some of the places we went and also to go to places we haven't had a chance to visit yet. Here's to the continuing adventure!
PARTING SHOT
The little Summer Girl gave us a scare last week. I put her outside Wednesday night as usual around 9:00. The next morning when we got up she was not waiting at the back door to be let inside, like she usually is. We waited all morning and she didn't show up. We went outside and walked around the whole yard, looking under bushes and shrubs to see if she was hiding, calling out her name. Our worst fear was that she was somewhere hurt. Linda even walked around the neighborhood looking for her, but no Summer Girl was to be found. We waited all day and that evening and we didn't see her anywhere. We were both beside ourselves because we had no idea what else to do. Needless to say, we didn't sleep well that night. But the next morning when Linda went to the back door to check and see, there she was. I was still in bed asleep, but I woke up to hear Linda coming down the hall saying, "She's back! She's back!" What a relief! We were both so scared we had lost our sweet little kitty and we were definitely not ready to go through that again. For the remainder of that day, Summer Girl spent her time sleeping on the bed or the chair, two places she isn't usually allowed. It was very clear to us that wherever she was, she had been through an ordeal. But we were so glad to have her back she could have gotten away with anything!
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| Definitely off limits! |
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| On her momma's chair, also off limits |
That's all for this week, check back again next week to see what the three of us have been up to!
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