PINK PUMPKINS BENEFITTING BREAST CANCER RESEARCH

Time to re-post this one:

When I put my Pink Pumpkin Challenge out there I didn’t know at the time that the Pink Pumpkin growers had partnered with a great foundation.

When I went to the store to pick mine out I saw that they all had stickers on them with the link to the Pink Pumpkin Patch Foundation.
www.PinkPumpkinPatch.org

This is from their website:

The Pink Pumpkin Patch Foundation was created in 2012 to aid in the fight against breast cancer. America’s pumpkin growers have committed to giving a percentage of proceeds from every pink pumpkin sold this year to organizations involved in breast cancer research.

The foundation will oversee the donations, and ensure that the funds go directly to reputable organizations with the highest percentage of dollars spent on actual research. We aim to be transparent, with a board that volunteers its’ time, no paid employees and low administrative costs.

I was thrilled. My fun idea will also have a purpose. Breast cancer research. Won’t you please join in?

So here is my display. A cozy, intimate dinner for two. Not at the dining table but at the cozy couch. A relaxed meal. Time to catch up since the BB Guy had been at the cabin all weekend with our sons.

A little pink in the glass and pink ribbon too. The pink pumpkins have a whitewashed look to them. A natural antique look.

I think they are so special. Deeply veined and naturally imperfect. Just like we all are.

So won’t you join me? Pink pumpkins or otherwise. Let’s see what wonderful pumpkin portraits you can all come up with. And please stop by the website www.PinkPumpkinPatch.org if you can help at all. 

I am linking to my own party. Come by and join in. Post a link to your own pumpkin decorations HERE. 

CALM THAT COUGH

I have a cold. Not a bad cold. Feeling okay. I rarely medicate a cold. It is what it is and I will get over it.

What is not okay is that I always end up with a scratchy cough. Just a tickle in my throat that makes me cough long and hard. Not a welcome thing at the office I assure you. Also makes it hard to sleep.

There is relief for this cough however. A non-medicinal trick to stop that cough. Don’t ask me how or why it works. IT JUST DOES!

Cut up an orange or grapefruit into wedges. Now just like when you were a kid you place it in your mouth in front of your teeth to make the giant smiley face. You remember that right?

Do not suck on the wedge or eat it. Just let it sit there and it will release its juice ever so slightly into your throat. For the most part you will stop coughing.

Seriously for real.

I even do this in bed to stop my cough in the night. You won’t choke. It is a big wedge.

I can find nothing to say why this works but it works instantly. Is it the way it opens up your airway when your mouth is stretched over the wedge of fruit? Is it the citrus vapour from the orange or grapefruit?

I don’t know. Just do it….and go look in the mirror to see how cute you look with a fruit wedge for a smile.

PULLED PORK FOR MY PEEPS

I was having a get together for people I work with on Friday night. The usual discussion came up about the food. Should it be a pot luck, ordering in pizza, or as one person requests over and over, my chicken fajitas which she asks me to make every time?

Someone suggested pulled pork and we went with that. I have cooked pork butts a few times and have come to realize that less is more. Not less pork but less fuss. It is, as usual a method and not a recipe.

Follow along. The key to tender fall apart pork is the cut of meat, cooking time and internal meat temperature. All the goodies in the world that you add to the pan will do little more than smell good as it will barely penetrate the meat.

Lets start with the cut of meat. Do not use pork loins. They are too lean and are not meant for this sort of cooking. You need pork butt which is actually pork shoulder. It has quite a lot of fat in it which is key to your long cooking time. If you only have a tiny one from your grocer it will not need to cook as long but due to the high fat content you will end up with very little meat and would be better off buying it precooked from a good vendor.

If you do not get your pork to an internal temperature of between 190 – 200 degrees the collagen in the meat will hold tight and you will have stringy, tough pork.

The pork butt will reach about 150 degrees at some point and then it will stop climbing in temperature for quite a while as the internal moisture makes it way out of the meat and to the surface. This is known as “the stall”. The temperature stalls for quite some time and cannot be predicted which is why you have to make sure you are cooking it long enough to get past  the stall and into the sweet spot of an internal temperature of 190 – 200 degrees.

So what do I put on my meat and in the pan? Any mixture of herbs and spices that you like can be used. I mixed together chili spice, cumin, fennel, pepper and cinnamon. Don’t put too much cinnamon though as it does tend to overpower all the other spices. It is a great ingredient for the aroma and you can smell it more than taste it in the meat.

Sprinkle your meat with a bit of olive oil and rub in your mix of herbs and spices on all sides. I use latex gloves for this step just because of the semi permanent aroma and reddish tinge that will follow you around all day if you don’t.

Put the meat in a big roasting pan, cover tightly with some heavy duty tin foil and put it in a 300 degree oven. Now go on vacation, or to work or back to bed. Leave this undisturbed for about 8 hours. Longer is fine if you oversleep.

You will take it out and let it rest for about half an hour and then uncover it. It will almost shred itself. Throw out all the fat and you will be left with the tender, juicy pork which you will PULL APART. Voila, you will have PULLED PORK. Who knew it was so easy.

Serve this up on soft buns with whatever kind of sauce you like. Barbeque, mustard, maybe a cider vinegar squirt. Top with a scoop of coleslaw and dig in.

NOW YOU SEE ME, NOW YOU DON’T

I have been in the blogging world since around February 2009. My introduction to this crazy, but fabulous world came through a recipe that I found on the Pioneer Woman’s blog.

I was making food for our yearly December Boxing Day party and was deep into the internet recipes when one site kept coming up over and over.

I noticed how these recipes had comments on them, in her case hundreds of them. Then I saw there were links in some of the comments. I clicked on them and they brought me to the blogs of those who had left a comment for Ree Drummond.

I was hooked. One blog led me to another and within a couple of weeks I knew had to figure out how to do this for myself.

Nobody I knew ever spoke of blogs. I decided to get a book on the subject and bought the Blogging For Dummies book. I don’t think I am dumb but these books are great at step by step instructions and great diagrams. Turned out that one of the authors of this particular one is co-written by a local Vancouver man, Shane Birley. Good thing for me because I needed his help at one point. So you come up with a name for your blog. You decorate your new space. You start over and change everything, twice. You add gadgets and widgets and decorations and photos. You learn some basic html code and it blows your mind. Templates come and go like a train in the station. We are creative and we need to change things.

You pat yourself on the back because you now know what a gadget, a widget and html are. You can now throw out these words at parties to the amazement of those who have not yet entered the blog world. They have no idea what you do. Your audience gathers around you as you tell them about the widget you added to your blog that you had to edit the html code to match the colors of your template. They think you are Bill Gates, not for the money part but for the techno brilliance you now exude. Actually their eyes glaze over and they excuse themselves to use the washroom.

Then you have to write. You have to actually post on this blog of yours. You have to find your niche.

Are you a Mom Blogger, a Food Blogger, a Travel Blogger, a Technology Blogger. Are you like me? An amalgamation of all of the above. I will call us Renaissance Bloggers (a person who has wide interests and is expert in several areas). We blog about all kinds of things that interest us and that we do.

Then it happens. Someone comments on your blog post. You are giddy with excitement. Oh. Wait. It is just spam but you remain hopeful and you finally build up a following for your blog. You get comments and you reply to them. Etiquette requires that you visit that person’s blog as well to reciprocate.  When I started blogging I was at home full time . I had the time to go and see many interesting places, shops, gardens and the like. I had lots of time to cook and to photograph the process for the blog. My garden beds were beautiful. I had time to paint and to do give-a-ways on my blog. I could decorate my home and join in memes. (note: add the word meme to my new blogging words. I had never heard of one before) I tablescaped on Thursdays and I posted food on Foody Fridays. I could post my metamorphosis on Metamorphosis Mondays with the rest of the uber creative bloggers.

Then it happened. I went back into the work force…full time. For 40 hours a week. There is little time nor energy left for the interesting things I used to have time to do.

There is little time left for visiting the bloggers who I have come to know well over the past 4 years. It is for this I feel the most disappointment. You guys know who you are. I used to visit you at least every other day. We laughed and chatted and left witty comments on each others blogs. We appreciated the hard work that went into each post. We shared our heartbreaks and losses as well as our triumphs and delights.

I am not going to quit blogging but I just wanted to explain why I post so little now and why I don’t get around to your blogs for visits. I am not burnt out I am just kinda boring now LOL.

How many of you are in the same boat? How do you squeeze it in?

 

I FOUGHT THE SPRINKLERS AND THE SPRINKLERS WON

As I write this I sit here wet, dirty and defeated. Over the years I have fought the sprinkler battle and I have finally admitted defeat. The sprinkler gods have won. They can stop laughing at me from their sprinkler cloud and move on to a new victim.

My lot is a quarter acre with many different garden beds and a large deck in the back yard. It is hard to place a sprinkler in a position to water what you want and not what you don’t.

I started like the rest of you with the oscillating sprinkler. You know the one. Green of course to look more natural on our green lawns….that is green if you can get a sprinkler to work.

It is pretty simple. It goes back and forth, back and forth in a path as wide as you choose by adjusting the little dials. These tend to get stuck in one position and you can hear the click, click, click of the oscillator trying to go back in the other direction in vain. These are all or nothing sprinklers hitting everything in their path with no adjustments for avoiding areas. For some smaller areas where the sprinkler had trouble reaching I tried a plain little Gardena model with adjustable spray pattern.

The downside of this is I would need to run 2 hoses, in both the front and back yards, to water the areas in my allotted watering times. This would cut down on the amount of water to the main sprinkler and I would have to move it partway through to reach the rest of the area.

Not to mention the stupid little connectors that break and leak all over. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

Okay let’s get a little more high end and adjustable and look at the Gilmour brand. More expensive for sure but this one was pretty good….for a while….

For getting into the nooks and crannies without soaking my doors, windows or my deck this one worked great albeit with a lot of adjustments. That is fine if you put it in the same spot every single time but since I have to move it to cover the whole yard  this became tedious. I had to have one for the front yard and one for the back and had to move and re-adjust both of them twice per watering session.

There is an orange ring in the middle and it has little tabs under it which you push up to different levels to set how far you want the spray to go at that point much like an automatic timer for your lights. There are many of them and it is quite effective but unfortunately the spray part of this one gave up the ghost and the water is just spewing out the end. Moving on.

I like quality and try not to buy crap that will break right away. Next investment was in the Rainbird metal sprinkler. It too says it is very adjustable….not so much. I could get it to go in either a complete circle or it would go most of the way around and then back the other way…. when it felt like it. Most times it would reach the stop point and instead of turning back it would just stop there and soak that spot. I tried using it yesterday again and had quite a time getting it going back and forth but finally did….for a while. I looked out the window later and saw it spinning at a high speed in a complete circle soaking my driveway. Sigh…I just left it. This morning I tried again in a different spot and it worked just fine, again long enough for me to turn my back and go in the house. When I checked on it about 10 minutes later it was stuck in one spot soaking a hydrangea that quite frankly was happy for the attention.

At the beginning of this summer I tried yet again to find something that could water a large enough area so that I didn’t have to move the sprinkler several times per session. Again I have to buy two. 

The orange dials on the left allow you to set the span of watering area in either direction. Good so far. The large tabs with the white lines allow you to bend the spray head to spray in a wider path. Okay. That should be good. Ya…..no…..

This one for some reason, even with full water pressure, and I have really good water pressure, doesn’t cover a big enough area. I have to move them 3 or 4 times to water the whole yard and that is front and back. Then of course the inevitable happened and the oscillator screws up and the adjustment won’t hold. It reaches the end and then drops in two more increments until it is stuck spraying almost level with the ground soaking in one spot. I go out and reset it and it works a couple more rounds, fanning back and forth, and then it drops again.

Every time I go through this process I get wet. I get grass all over my feet. I sometimes get sprayed right in the face.

I am ready to let everything die and pave it all. Or maybe I will just get a couple of these and call it a day.

DINNER AT THE BOATHOUSE

We had a lovely dinner out for our 31st. anniversary.

We had a great little table on the patio with a view of the inlet and mountains. We live in one of the most beautiful places around and watching the sun drop down behind the hillside…fabulous.

31 YEARS AND COUNTING

Happy Anniversary to my BB Guy!

Married for 31 years, together for 38.

We haven’t changed a bit in all that time…except for my apparent loss of my grip on reality!!! LOL. 

We plan a simple dinner out. Last year was the big celebration you can read about here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. 

A SULTRY MORNING

She slowly holds the steaming mug of strong, black coffee to her nose and breathes in deeply taking in the rich aroma. She tips the mug slightly and the dark liquid seeps between her lips and into her mouth. As the warmth slides down her throat she begins to awaken.
Either that or I am just going to slurp this coffee back until I feel like a human being again.