It was a wet and windy weekend here in the northwest. That's about what we can expect this time of year. Just before the rain, leaves swirled down, littering the lawn, garden, and driveway. At this point, the leaves are simply a beautiful reminder of the season. We'll get to raking them up later in the month.
As a result of the turn in weather, I spent almost all of my time indoors (with exceptions to darting outside to harvest whatever I needed for the time). It was a productive weekend. Here are visuals of the highlights:
autumn-inspired brownies -- very, very simple. Lightly place candy corn pieces onto top of batter before baking; do not press into batter. I used this recipe, but baked in the traditional oven at 350 degrees F for 20 minutes.
bread -- with wet weather came cooler temps. Baking loaves of bread helped heat the kitchen just as we were sitting down to a soup supper.
crimson crabapple and spice jelly -- one of several batches in the next 2 weeks (our tree is loaded). Pro-tip: use lightweight scissors to clip the apples from the branches to harvest hard to pluck crabapples -- the picking goes much faster and doesn't damage next year's fruiting spurs.
3 small jars of bread and butter pickles with almost the last of the cucumbers
more dill relish with some green tomatoes that were showing signs of blight (trimming away the browning parts first) and garden-fresh dill weed. We now have 5 jars of dill relish to begin the year. I have a couple more blighted green tomatoes waiting in the fridge to be made into sweet relish tomorrow or the next day.
an early Saturday AM trip to Dollar Tree, picking up several bags of pretzels and jars of roasted peanuts for our winter pantry. The pretzels were a better buy at DT than Walmart's Great Value, but the peanuts were slightly more expensive at DT. Win some, lose some. I also bought some much needed liquid dish detergent, sponges, and a bottle brush.
All of this is not to say that I didn't have any less-productive moments. I played my share of games of solitaire on the computer and read lots of news sites while sitting by the electric fire in the living room (so very handy that fireplace). I also vacuumed and did laundry. But do you really want to see pictures of my vacuum or piles of laundry? I thought not.
I hope you all had a wonderful weekend! What kept you busy?
A shout-out to anyone reading from Canada -- Happy Thanksgiving, friends!
