Wheeeee!

One of Ian's favorite games: Wagon racing!

Butternut Squash Soup

If you haven't noticed already, in our family, we mark the seasons by our menus. In the spring, I pull out recipes starring fresh flavors and bright colors, like my spring pea soup. In the summer, the grill is often the main event, cooking up a variety of meats along with veggies from our garden. And in the fall, we love us some squash -- lots of it! Pumpkin dip with ginger snap cookies, maple-roasted acorn squash, Arabian squash casserole, and of course, the star of them all, butternut squash soup. Thanks to Food & Wine Magazine, I have a simple, mouth-watering recipe that keeps us coming back year after year and time after time. Want a true fall experience? Follow me on a journey of squash soup....and then make some for yourself!

Step 1: Slice the squash in half and roast it in a 350 degree oven, face down, and get it all nice and soft. This'll take about 40 minutes, during which time you can chop up the white and tender green parts of two large leeks. When the squash is fork-tender, remove it from the oven and let it cool. Scoop out and toss the seeds, then scoop out the flesh with a spoon. Set it aside and discard the skins in your trash or compost bin.

Step 2: Melt 5 tablespoons of unsalted butter in a large saucepan or soup pot, the saute the leeks and 6 or 7 fresh thyme sprigs until the leeks are soft and the thyme is fragrant (about 5 minutes). Your house will start to smell really yummy by this point! At this point, you can discard the thyme sprigs, and add the squash along with 5 cups of chicken or vegetable stock. Simmer over medium heat for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.

Step 3: Puree the soup with whatever method you have on hand. I use a stick blender (a.k.a., an immersion blender) for the job, but a blender or regular food processor will work too. Just puree it in batches if you use one of the latter two. Don't be afraid to pulverize the mixture, because, believe me, you want this as smooth as possible!

Step 4: Serve and enjoy the hearty, yet light warmth of this delicious fall recipe. It goes perfectly with a mug of hot cider and some fresh bread.

Happy Autumn!

Riding Topless...

...for probably the last time this season. We'll probably be putting the hard top on the Jeep in the next week or two to combat against these cold temps we're having. Bye, bye, Summer!

Canning Tomatoes For the First Time

As you know, the garden we tended this summer did not produce tomatoes like I had hoped. (See my lament here.) However, a couple of weeks ago, I was taking a stroll around our neighborhood with Ian and Jan (my nanny charge), and as we neared our house, my incredibly nice and generous neighbor Sheri came out of her garage and offered me some tomatoes that she had picked up from a roadside stand that afternoon. Apparently, the guy was desperate to get rid of his tomatoes, because he gave her a huge box for only $5, along with some red peppers. So, Sherri unloaded about half of the tomatoes on me. The next day, she came by my house with yet another box, explaining that she had driven by that same spot today and bought yet another huge box of tomatoes, and would I like some? And, oh yes, they're free. "Shoot!", I thought, "Load me up!" So she did.

What was I to do with this plethora of tomatoey-goodness? Why, can them, of course! It took me a few days to do it because we had a busy couple of days ahead of us, so I shoved the tomatoes in the fridge (I know, a huge no-no), hoping that they would last long enough for me to process them before they rotted. Thank goodness, most of them survived, and I was able to can them in two batches. Here's the 2nd batch, ready to be peeled, shoved into cans, and cooked to death:

I peeled them by putting them in boiling water for a couple minutes until the skins burst, then plunging them into ice water, followed by separating the skins from the meat, dicing them in my hands as I went. My kitchen looked like a murder had taken place.

Then, I filled a bunch of wide-mouthed glass Ball jars with the tomatoes and a teaspoon of lemon juice (to balance the pH), and processed them in boiling water in a large canning pot for 45 minutes. Place them on a towel on the counter, let cool overnight, attach labels with the name and date, and voila! Canned tomatoes are now in my possession. They joined my pickling attempts on my basement shelves for future use.

I was once a canning virgin, but no longer! Thanks to my mom for walking me through the canning steps and imparting her wisdom as I went. I'm looking forward to the salsas and marinaras and chilis that will grace our table this fall and winter due to my neighbor's generosity and willingness to help a poor farmer out by taking his tomatoes off his hands.

We'll miss you, Maggie Lou

Maggie: Sometime in the fall of 2000-9/23/09.

We never intended to keep her. In the fall of 2001, Eric's parents went on a vacation for a week or two and needed a cat sitter. They came home, and she just stayed with us. At first, I struggled with liking her. I had recently said good-bye to my childhood cat, Joy, who was a dainty, princess-like creature who had been a part of my life for sixteen of my twenty-two years. Maggie was a fat, lumbering, snappy kitty who didn't seem to want to get close to anyone. She'd had a hard year of life behind her already (due to illness and the affections of a particularly obloquious toddler of the previous owners before Eric's parents), and it took a while for her to warm up to a human relationship. But we loved her through it, and eventually, I even came to like her.

She was extremely independent in spirit, all the while being terribly dependent upon us for her care. We loved her through an eating disorder, issues with bladder sands, a liver infection that almost killed her in 2005, and finally an infected abdominal cyst that would ultimately mark the end of her life.

When we found the cyst earlier this summer and received the dire prognosis from the vet, we decided to make her as comfortable as possible and let her enjoy the summer. Since we had recently fenced in our backyard, she was allowed to roam freely while basking in the sun, chasing (and even catching!) chipmunks, and arguing with contentious squirrels. One such squirrel really hated her. Anytime she would walk outside and he was around, he would climb to a high point above her and chatter at her incessantly, even resorting to throwing acorns at her at times. Sometimes she would chase him, sometimes she'd chirp back, but mostly she would just ignore him and walk around the yard as if to let him know who really owned the property.

On the afternoon of her death, she was buried in the northwest corner of our backyard, behind some rose bushes. As she was removed from her box and placed in the ground, that very same squirrel came out of hiding, perched on the fence above her, and began his customary scolding. Maybe he didn't realize she was gone. Maybe he did, and it was his way of saying goodbye. Or maybe he just wanted to get in the last word.

Eric and Ian saying their goodbyes before taking Maggie to the vet. 9/23/09

We'll miss you, Maggie. Rest in peace.

My poor zucchini

So, we had a garden this summer, which was only semi-successful. Since the plot of land recently used to be in a trailer court, the soil was not so much, shall we say, fertile? Anyway, half of the 15x30' plot was great: zucchini, pole beans, tri-color snap beans, eggplants, hot red chili peppers (as opposed to Red Hot Chili Peppers....don't even get "Dani California" in my head -- I'll go crazy at approximately 2am tomorrow morning), and cucumbers all had a hay-day and produced like mad for at least a little while. The other half produced, well, not much: my tomatoes were sparse, my green peppers non-existent, my watermelon was eaten by something else, my lettuce and basil didn't even bother coming up, and my experiment with tomatillos was a complete failure. But, hey, I had TONS of zucchini. Well, at least dozens of pounds, especially when I let them grow too long and they became mammoth, like scary zucchini from Giant Land. In the midst of my mourning for produce never to be enjoyed, I was consoled by the fact that at least I wouldn't have to buy zucchini for, like, a year. I even chopped, shredded, and sliced them, then dutifully froze them in freezer bags for future use, all the while dreaming of the enchiladas, zucchini bread, and stir-fries I would be able to make all winter. Take a look at all this lovely zucchini, ready to be frozen:

Then, the unthinkable happened. Somehow, the freezer door in the basement was left ajar....for at least a day or two, who knows how long. What I found was nothing but bags of drippy, water-logged zucchini that will almost certainly never be good eats. And remember all those blueberries we picked? Yep, blueberry mush. I nearly cried.

But, since everything was still at least cool, we cleaned out the drippy freezer and tried to freeze everything again. We'll see what happens. At this point, what's lost is lost.

Oh, and after cleaning up the mess, I shimmied up the front of the freezer, which apparently had been tilting ever-so-slightly forward on our sloped basement floor, so that the door now swings shut with a nice "thump." Hopefully, nothing like this will happen again.

And maybe next year, our garden will produce more than just zucchini.

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Buddies

Here are Ian and his buddy A.J. at the IU football game this past weekend:
A.J.'s mommy and I were both pregnant during the fall of 2005, when we all met for the first time at tailgating, and we've been tailgating together ever since, even though Eric and I are only able to make it to a couple games a season now. This time, the boys had a great time playing catch at the new Knothole Park, the scaled-down replica of the Hoosiers' football field. Hopefully, these boys will always associate IU football with each other!
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We Will Dance

This past weekend we had the privilege of taking a trip to Bloomington where we got to enjoy an IU football win on a beautiful sunny day, eat some of our favorite food, and see some of our favorite people. On Sunday, we visited our former church, where, I swear, they knew I was coming back and decided to play all of my favorite songs during worship.

As an added bonus, Pastor Bob preached a killer sermon (as usual) on Philippians 2:12-21 about Paul's joyful and eternal perspective in the midst of and even because of his imprisonment for the gospel. Here this guy was in prison, chained to a guard, sitting in his own filth...and rejoicing, simply because the good news about Christ was spreading and God was being glorified through his suffering. Sounds pretty crazy and super-human, huh? Pastor Bob encouraged us by pointing out that while Paul was exemplifying the perspective we ought to have, he was just as human as we are and didn't feel this way all the time. He surely had his moments of fear, doubt, and weakness (see the "thorn in the flesh" passage in 2 Corinthians 12), but by the grace of God, he was able to see things with an eternal perspective and therefore, was actually joyful that he was suffering at times and had sufficient courage because he had hope that God would be glorified through it all. That's all that mattered to him.

In response to the sermon, we sang with joy, "We Will Dance," an ECC classic that is usually sung after communion. They get all rhythmic and clap on the 2nd and 3rd beats, skipping the first...which is pretty progressive and difficult for a bunch of white people! I couldn't find a version to share with you that was up-tempo the way the ECC band plays it, but Clay Crosse's rendition is close. Enjoy:

We Will Dance - Clay Crosse

10 years later

Labor Day 1999 at Warren Dunes: a Bethel tradition fosters the start of a glorious history.
Labor Day 2009 at Warren Dunes: We've only just begun....
And now we have a cool little kid to share life with! So blessed!
Swimming with Mimi and Papa. The water was freezing!!!
What's more fun than digging in the sand?

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Wii have finally joined a cult

After a lot of unholy technological lusting, wii have finally joined the wii club. Using money saved from my 29th birthday, along with some cash from my 30th, I was able to scrape together exactly enough to purchase a Wii.

Why a Wii? Why not a PS3? Well, for one, the PS3 was more expensive. The real reason though was that a Wii seems like a more family-friendly gaming platform that will allow me to play games with Lisa and Ian. And you know what? I was right.

Ian has already latched onto baseball and bowling; however, I have real fears that he might take out our TV while playing. :)



As a side note, we are acquiring games for our Wii via Goozex.com. Goozex is a fantastic video game trading site where you can unload games that you don't play anymore in order to earn points towards other games. For example, I listed 3 Playstation games on Goozex and was able to get enough points to get The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and I'm on a waiting list for Mario Kart. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle...it works for video games too!