Apple Hand Pies

 Whenever I have pastry made for baking I always have this urge to make little hand pies with it but I never follow through thinking it's going to be way to much work fiddling around with them. Not long ago though when I was grocery shopping I found this cute little mold for making apple shaped hand pies that would be just perfect for using with the apples we had left from picking and I knew my daughter would love it to :)

 With our chilled pastry and floured rolling pins in hand we started rolling and placing our dough in the press.

 Why do these little things always look like they are going to make the job so simple but it's never quite so?! The instructions said to use the outside of the press like a cookie cutter to get apple shaped pastry pieces that you then laid inside with the filling and  pressed together to make your hand pie. 

Of course this totally didn't work when the pastry started to slide into the indentations on the inside of the press while needing the strength of He-Man to make the crimped edges show up. All this was definitely giving me flashbacks to a pierogi maker I tried using years ago that squeezed all of the filling into a doughy balloon that got stuck in the crack of the press making an awful mess *grin*.

Needless to say we tossed those instructions in the trash can! LOL.

In the end we just cut our pastry into rectangular shapes and layered them in the press with our sliced apple filling sandwiched in between and it worked out so much better :) L rolled and filled while I pressed them as hard as I could until we ran out of pastry.

 

Oh my goodness were they delicious!!! We sprinkled a bit of cinnamon sugar on top before baking them and when they came out of the oven and cooled enough so that we could hold them they were nice and firm and the perfect treat for a chilly fall afternoon.... not sure how soon I'm going to attempt making them again though *grin*.

Hugs,

Rosina

Autumn Afternoon

 After what seemed like days of never ending gray the clouds finally parted yesterday afternoon to let the sun shine its warming rays down upon us.

I'm pretty sure we literally dropped everything as we made a mad dash for the outdoors before the rain started again :)

 We explored the fields looking for interesting fungi that have started to sprout with the onset of the autumn chill...

giggled as we stood under the giant maple trees while the wind blew oodles of stray leaves in brilliant colors down upon our heads...

 and gathered the prettiest ones to take inside to stash away for more rainy day crafting.

 The rain started again today so I'm thankful for those few short hours that we did get to explore outdoors. 

I have so many things to be thankful for these last few days. Many of you probably heard about the 7.7 magnitude earthquake that shook many parts of BC. We felt it here and in the aftermath it put all of the northern BC coast along with the northern part of our island where we live on a tsunami advisory. My husband who was at the time even further north was tied up at one of the marinas and emergency service crews got them to higher ground in the event that there was a tsunami but thankfully there wasn't one. So many communities up and down the coast from Alaska to Hawaii were on pins and needles as no one was sure of what to expect so I am so thankful that amazingly there seems to be very little damage for those families that were closest to the epicenter of the earthquake and that everyone that was evacuated is safe. 

It was if anything a wake up call to be more prepared. Our family has practiced earthquake drills, where to meet if we have to escape from our home and we have supplies on hand but I think we can do more. They tell you to be prepared for at least 72 hours in the event of an emergency but we're remote, rural and just a tiny blip on the radar when things happen. Winter storms take out our power regularly and we are always far down the list for repairs which at times have been longer than 3 days so when I think of what sort of destruction that earthquakes have caused in Haiti, Christchurch and the tsunami in Japan I'm not sure that 72 hours will cut it. How about you? Do you have your emergency kit ready just in case?

My thoughts and prayers are with those of you on the east coast tonight as you hunker down while hurricane sandy passes through your towns.

Hugs,

Rosina

Fall Comfort Food ~ Sweet Potato Gnocchi

 October 1st was the first time I had to light the woodstoves to take the chill off of the air in our home and we awoke to our first hard frost of the season yesterday! The lawn was crispy and white and all of the water buckets for the cows and chickens had a layer of ice locking in the fresh water below. All of this cold weather has definitely left me yearning for warm comfort foods :)

I've been building up a little recipe cache on Pinterest which is where I found a yummy recipe for sweet potato gnocchi but I didn't have all of the ingredients on hand so I took a chance and remixed the recipe a bit and it turned out delicious!

 In place of the ricotta cheese I used one egg, subbed in 1/2 a cup of asiago cheese instead of the parmesan, reduced the salt to 1 tsp. of sea salt in the dough instead of the two she called for and I baked my sweet potatoes in the oven for about 45 minutes at 400 degrees fahrenheit instead of microwaving them.

Now this was my very first time making gnocchi so I had no idea how sticky the dough would be but I found that I needed to use at least 4 cups of flour to get my dough to be workable and not crazy sticky but the original recipe only called for 2 3/4 cups. So I'm thinking my sweet potatoes were much larger than hers but you'll definitely know if you need to add more flour *grin*. 

 With my dough all ready to go I got busy rolling out dough snakes, chopping them into little bite sized pieces with my pastry cutter and then rolling them around with the tines of a fork to give them the little indentations in the photo. Nobody told me how many little gnocchi this recipe made though!!

I kept cutting and rolling and cutting and rolling...

until I had two giant cookie sheets full of them plus more all over the counter. On my final count I had over 200 of them so they all went into the freezer except for the ones I kept out for dinner and we're all stocked up for a good while now I think :)

The kids aren't real big on the taste of sage so I omitted the sage butter that went along with the recipe as well and instead made an easy sauce with basil and homemade chicken stock. 

I used:

1 cup homemade chicken stock

1 tbsp dried basil

1 tbsp arrowroot powder

1 tbsp onion powder

salt & pepper to taste

Mix all of the above together in the cold chicken stock and pour over two carrots cut into matchsticks, two cups of broccoli florets and 3 cloves of pressed garlic that have been sauteed until just tender. The arrowroot created a nice thick sauce just perfect for our fresh gnocchi to be coated in. Mmm, mmm good. Now if only there were leftovers *grin*.

Hugs,

Rosina

Hello Fall ~ Apple Picking

 Fall is definitely settling in for an extended stay :)

The leaves are turning beautiful reds, oranges and golds, the mornings are cool and crisp, even the evening fog that creeps through the fields at dusk has reappeared but the real highlight is that the apples are finally ready!

 With our baskets in hand we made our way down the lane to the apple trees that my dad has been tending for over a decade.

 Why is it that the best apples are always out of reach :)

 With an apple eye view L got busy picking the biggest apples she could find...

 and passing them down to her brother...

 who was waiting below hoping to fill up his basket first :)

 For the really hard to reach apples my dad has this really great tool that has rake like prongs on the tips to catch around the stems of the apples and then it pulls them off the branches and they land gently on the foam pad inside the basket :) So much better than trying to shake them off of the tree *grin*.

 The children waddled home under the weight of their apple basket with giant smiles on their faces and thoughts of all the ways that we were going to be able to eat them.

 Apple muffins, apple pancakes, apple slices dipped in nut butter, apple pie...

oh it's apple heaven *grin*.

Hugs,

Rosina

Storm Watching & Video

We had storm warnings all along the east coast of the island today with winds reaching upwards of 90 km/hour at its peak, ferries between us and the mainland were cancelled and poor Hubby and the kids spent the whole day without power. Lucky me I was further down island where the power was still on *grin*.

On the way home I stopped to catch some of the action after the wind had slowed down a bit but the waves still towered way above me as they crashed over the sea wall in Qualicum this evening. I managed to stay dry but at there were a couple of times where I thought I was going to be soaked for sure as the water rushed upwards in front of me :)

I took a little bit of video on my camera while I was there to share to :) It's only about 10 seconds long but really cool to see how the water just rockets along the wall as it hits. If you are reading this via email or google reader you might have to jump over to my blog to see it :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Fall Tree Art Fun

The weather has been absolutely miserable here for the last week so we've been bringing the outdoors in and we tried making some of the fall trees I saw over at the artist woman using watercolors, acrylic paint, straws and pointillism :)

Remember a couple of days ago I had mentioned I was going to let the kids blow paint through straws and cross my fingers that it didn't end up splattered all over the walls? Well it all turned out good and boy was it fun!! If you take some regular acrylic paint and thin it out with tap water to a runny ink like consistency you can actually drop it onto your paper in a blob and blow it all across your page to create tree trunk forms :)It's really cool to watch it streak along and branch off in different directions. The key we found to nice smooth branches was to make sure that we didn't drag our straw along through the paint as we blew. This made the shapes thicker and more blobby. And of course try not to drool through the straw as you blow LOL.

After we let our tree trunks dry we randomly dotted fall colors using q-tips to our branches creating fun fall colors :)

They're going to look great hanging on the wall when they're all dry :)

What fall art projects have you been doing?
Hugs,
Rosina

Happy Halloween

Today was party day around here as we celebrated Hubby's birthday and had our Halloween party full of ghoulish foods :) There was monster mouths, rotten cheese logs and pumpkin vomit (homemade guacamole flowing out of my mini pumpkins mouth).

The Zombie intestines which were a huge hit! I love how these turned out and they are just puff pastry filled with sausage meat, a little pizza sauce and then some fake blood to really make them fun :) I found the recipe here.

And my grand finale of brains *grin*.
These were so easy to make with icing, cake and raspberry jam. I found the recipe here and the great labels for the top to with little sayings like 'Brains... they do a body good' and 'Brains... never hurts to have extra'. So fun!

Every year I treat the kids to special Halloween candy apples and we go to the Rocky Mountain Chocolate factory in the city where they have a giant display case full of candy apples with funny faces :)

They have giant granny smith apples in the centers and are so good. All that apple must counteract the sugar, right? LOL

After dinner we headed outside to let off some fireworks...

and then have cake to celebrate Hubby's birthday.
I hope you all had a great Halloween to and celebrated it your special way :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Our Fall Garden...

is growing strong :)

It is such a treat to pull open my creaking and quite visibly crooked garden gate with my kitchen bowl in one hand and a the warm fingers of my little one in the other as we tromp together through the weeds and grass that have now taken over the paths between the rows and search for the delicious treats that are waiting beneath their coverings.

We have been enjoying the extra beets I planted this summer immensely! Oh my goodness are they yummy. All of the children love them so I've been boiling them up by the pot full for our dinners and eating the leftovers cold in salads and the turnips are a special treat for me :)

The cold weather has begun here and the temperatures have been dropping to just above freezing or slightly below at night. The perfect temperatures to sweeten them up just right. Who new one could get so giddy over vegetables *grin*.

Along with the vegetables there are a few flowers and herbs still thriving. One of my favorite herbs is my Mullein (verbasacum) with it's giant fuzzy leaves and towering spears of little yellow flowers reaching for the sky. The kids love to pick the leaves and rub them on their cheeks as they are just as soft as a bunnies ear :)

They are a wonderful herb for coughs and asthma to. The leaves and flowers contain mucilage which can be very helpful in soothing coughs and acting as an anti-inflammatory for the lungs. I myself make a tea from the dried leaves and flowers and drink it to help with my own asthma :) Another wonderful thing to make with it is to make an oil with the flowers to treat earaches. So many wonderful uses and it self sews rapidly providing fuzzy leaves the first year and flower spears the second year :)

Do you have a fall garden planted? What sort of vegetables are you growing?

Hugs,
Rosina

Fall Leaf Sugar Cookies

We are spending a lot of our days embracing the beauty of fall around here lately as we watch the leaves on the trees transition to their vibrant autumn colors and we happily jump on their crunchy counterparts that litter the lanes :) The children keep bringing in handfuls of stray leaves to that they just couldn't resist because they were 'to pretty' and I keep picking up crumbled bits off of the tile floor beneath our nature table as they fall apart from all of the handling *grin*.

So when I saw a photo of some great fall leaf cookies on the Country Living website I just had to bake some with the kids. The only problem was there was no recipe so I made a batch of my favorite sugar cookie dough that I use all the time and thought I'd share it with you to. It makes a nice sized batch of dough for tons of fun :)

4 eggs
2 cup sugar
2 cup unsalted butter

Cream the butter and sugar together. Add one egg at a time and beat really well until the butter mixture is super light and fluffy.

1 tsp. baking powder
5 cups all purpose flour

Add the flour and baking powder to the butter mixture and mix just until combined. Once you've got it all combined divide your dough into four chunks. Don't worry about being completely accurate, just eyeball it up.

Now color each of your dough balls a different fall color :) I really like to use Wilton Gel colors. They create gorgeous vibrant colors and they are cleaner to work with than the old drip style liquid food coloring. You can find them at most grocery stores and walmart.

After you have finished adding your food coloring, wrap each piece in a bit of saran wrap and place in the fridge for about 20 minutes so that dough firms up and makes it easy for rolling later :) Roll out your dough on a floured counter top and bake in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for 10 - 12 minutes or until just starting to brown and firm up around the edges and the centers are slightly puffed up.

I set the kitchen up with three work stations so that each of the children had their own rolling pin, cookie cutters and assortment of colors and they had fun ripping off chunks of color and creating their own fall color palette :)

It actually turned into a color blending lesson on top of the baking fun as we watched the colors meld together creating new tones of oranges and greens and the surprise arrival of brown each time we balled up our dough scraps and rolled them out again. Things got quite psychedelic LOL.

So much yummy fall fun. I can see we're going to have a lot of tea parties in the coming days *grin*.

Hugs,
Rosina

Celebrating Michaelmas

On thursday we celebrated our very first Michaelmas :)
I had found a great pattern and had been secretly cutting and stitching together a little wool dragon each night after the kids were in bed that would be perfect for our little playmobil Sir George to battle. I finished it up just in time and set it up on our nature table for them to find in the morning when they awoke.

Of course they beat me out of bed and I could hear them gathering excitedly around the Michaelmas scene when they got up and then the quiet that followed as they discovered the little coloring pages of a knight fighting a dragon that I had left on their tables for them to color. It was perfect. I had a few minutes to catch up on what I had to do to get the day started and they had fun picking their favorite colors for their dragons :)

After lunch we took some time to read a little story about Sir George and the Dragon. There seem to be a lot of different versions of Michaelmas stories from St. Michael hurling the dragon (lucifer) from heaven to Sir George slaying the dragon and our gentler version that I decided to go with of a dragon that had the hiccups and the gnomes that called on Sir George to help them solve their problem of a pesky fire breathing dragon. You can find a few different versions here:

The Most Beautiful Dragon
A Little Flower Garden's Michaelmas Festival
Our Little Nature Nests Michaelmas Story
In the end our dragon became the bread maker and I thought it was a perfect fit for my 5 year old :) It came from a copy of Before the Journey that I purchased last year.

With our story fresh in our minds and the anticipation of a fire breathing bread maker we went into the kitchen to make some green bread dough together to shape our dragon out of :)

They added gnarly toenails with pumpkin seeds...

poked in spines made of almonds and we cut in scales with a knife that puffed up and gave him a great lumpy body. Oh boy did he taste good with dinner, although there is something very odd about eating green bread. It just feels weird *grin*.

I can't wait until next year so that we can do it again and maybe add in some more fun ideas that I've seen around the web. One great post with lots of links is over at Rockin' Granola but if you google Michaelmas you will find tons of inspiration!

In case you would like to try my bread recipe I thought I would share it with you. It makes awesome soft white buns if you want a non green or dragonish version for another day LOL.

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup unsalted butter
1 egg
a dribble of maple syrup
2 1/2 tsp. yeast
3 1/2 cups unbleached flour
green food coloring optional

Heat your milk and water until it is nice and warm, pour it into your mixing bowl along with your maple syrup, sprinkle your yeast over the water/milk and allow it to proof for about 10 minutes until nice and bubbly. Add your melted butter, egg, and 1 cup of flour and mix. I like to do this to break up my egg nicely before adding the rest of the flour. Now add in your remaining 2 1/2 cups of flour and mix until it forms a ball that you can turn out onto your counter to knead. Knead for about 5-8 minutes until nice and soft and smooth. Cover and allow it to rest until doubled in size. Punch down your dough after it rises and you can now shape it into your dragon, rolls or whatever you would like to use it for :)
Bake at 425 Fahrenheit for 15-20 minutes or until nice and golden and sounds hollow when you tap on it.

If you celebrated Michaelmas and shared photos or stories on your blog I would love to stop by and see how you made your day special :)

Hugs,
Rosina

Last Vegetables in the Garden

The nights are growing colder up our neck of the woods and with a few frosty mornings lately I thought that maybe we should head out to the garden and pick some of what is left still growing out there :)

Any bits of lettuce and radishes that were left behind have now gone to seed but we have a row of red cabbage that is flourishing in the wet weather. I think the kids were quite surprised to find that they had grown so big!

Everyone had a turn tearing off the large bug eaten outer leaves and pulling the heads, roots and all out of the soil :) Harvesting is sooo much more fun than weeding! I don't remember seeing so much enthusiasm when it was time to pull chickweed, thistles and other weeds *grin*.

Here's one of our larger ones. It must have been around 8 inches in diameter and quite heavy. As I had my little mini photo shoot with the kids you could see that their arms were getting quite tired from lifting them up *grin*. They're such good sports for their mama LOL.

All that's left now are the leeks. They are doing fabulously despite being completely surround by weeds *grin*. We stopped weeding a while ago. Part laziness, part master plan as the weeds were covering the soil and keeping it much more moist than when the dirt was open to the sun and then it dried out so quickly. Haha, see there is a method to my madness!!

I'm not quite ready to pull them all as there are way to many to just eat so I would have to blanch them for freezing so I think I might mulch them and see if I can prevent them from freezing and be able to pull them fresh from the garden as I need them :) How long do you leave your leeks in the garden?

Hugs,
Rosina