Our Cranberry Bush & 15 Minutes of Fame

About a week ago a woman whose blog I follow sent a message asking if she could use one of my photos (this one of the cranberry bush in November) in an upcoming blogpost.

Naturally I said, "yes". I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

She is known as Jasmine & Roses. An amazing photographer and a gifted writer. She's from North Carolina.

The blog, Town & Country Gardens is full of beautiful pictures from gardens all over the world. I love how she has it set up with lots of sections. It's not just gardening, either. There are recipes and arts and crafts.

There are DIY posts - how to start an organic kitchen garden, for example. There is a recipe for Candied Nuts with pecans...pecans grow in North Carolina so that recipe is probably a keeper.

My photograph of the cranberry bush is in the Flora, Now Section for November 2009. So check it out and look for this photo.

But most of all, browse through all the stuff she's got on that blog. It's amazing...I've barely scratched the surface. If you're a gardener, you'll get hooked, for sure. If you're not, well, there's bound to be something in that blog you'll love. Just click on the Reference A - Z tab and you're good to go.

A Honey Crisp Apple Pie

I made an apple pie, yesterday, with good old Minnesota Honey Crisp Apples. Wow, is it ever good! I only cheated by using a ready made pie crust - Pillsbury makes a great refrigerated crust (2 crusts) that you just unroll one of the crusts onto the pie plate, fill it up and place the second crust on top, cut little vents and pinch the edges closed. Easy as pie!

I used my old faithful apple pie filling recipe from my old faithful Betty Crocker cookbook that I've had forever. In fact, I was working on a Squidoo lens about cookbooks and discovered that if this particular Betty Crocker cookbook was in pristine condition it would be worth a lot more than it originally cost. I'm hard on cookbooks, though.

Making apple pie from fresh apples isn't difficult. The hardest part is peeling the apples and when you really only need five or six you can't exactly complain. Here's the recipe for the filling. It's for a 9-inch pie.

First you need pastry for a 9-inch, 2 crust pie.

Then, combine:
3/4 cup sugar (I used raw sugar)
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
Dash salt
6 cups thinly sliced pared tart apples
2 tablespoons butter

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees F. Prepare the pastry. Stir together the sugar, flour, nutmeg, cinnamon and salt; mix with the apples. Turn the filling into the pie crust, dot with the butter and cover with the top crust. Cut some slits into the crust (I always do this before I place the top crust onto the pie filling). Seal the edge and either flute with your fingers or with the tines of a fork.

Cover the edge with a strip of aluminum foil or pie crust shield to prevent over browning. You can remove the foil the last 15 minutes or so before the pie is finished.

Bake 40 to 50 minutes or until the crust is brown and the juices begin to bubble through the slits in the crust.

I usually check it at about 30 minutes just to see how it's doing. If I've forgotten to put the foil on the crust edges, I will do it then. But that's really asking for burnt fingers - ha!

Cool on a wire rack. Delicious served either slightly warm or cold with vanilla ice cream. Mmmm.

On Becoming a Giant Squid

Well, I did it...I became a Giant Squid. Fifty quality lenses (pages) created on Squidoo.com. I joined Squidoo in February of 2008 with the idea that I could practice writing because I wanted to start another blog or a website...well, so far I've only got this one blog but have become totally addicted to Squidoo (just ask Jack!). Here's the t-shirt that I just received in the mail, yesterday. It's only for Giant Squids - yay!

What is Squidoo? Here's a snippet of information from the Squidoo page about Squidoo... There's also lots of information about how Squidoo was founded and little bits about all of the creative minds behind this great publishing platform. More talent than you can shake a fist at. But they're mostly really great people with big hearts.

"Squidoo is the popular publishing platform and community that makes it easy for you to create "lenses" online. Lenses are pages, kind of like flyers or signposts or overview articles, that gather everything you know about your topic of interest--and snap it all into focus."

The best part is that a portion of all proceeds earned from all lenses created is donated to charity. That's the big focus on Squidoo...giving to worthy causes. My favorite causes are:

The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society

The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric Aids Foundation

The Acumen Fund

I've also contributed to The Children's Defense Fund, Save the Children, and The Humane Society. But there are dozens of others. There's a whole list of worthy causes.

So if you'd like to read any of my pages, check out my "Lensography". A lensography is sort of a directory of pages. I've got more than a dozen pages on recipes and cooking, several travel pages, some on gardening, home staging and holidays and more.

Oh, and I almost forgot...you can actually earn money for yourself! How great is that?

If you think Squidoo might be for you just click on the Do You Squidoo? link on any of my pages...I'll get credit (a pat on the back) for anyone who joins from a link on my lenses.

That's it...next goal? Giant 100. Yep, that's another 50 lenses. But I'm taking my time on these...a harmonious marriage is at stake if I spend any more time on the computer than I already do - ha!

Nancy's Hoe House

I was just browsing through the photos that I have on the computer...there are thousands of them. I really, really need to go through everything and back everything up in case the computer totally blows up at some point. Okay, that's on the to-do list. But in the meantime, it was fun looking at some of the pictures I'd forgotten about.

I thought you'd enjoy this very cute potting shed that a friend has in her yard. She's actually my sister's sister-in-law. She lives on a farm with her very nice husband. She found an old chicken house back in the wooded area behind the house and hauled it out, painted it, added some adorable window boxes and made herself a nifty little gardening shed.

So my sister had these little signs made (or maybe she made them herself) to put on the shed which she dubbed "Nancy's Hoe House". Get it? I think it's hilarious! Especially the "The Hoe is In (or Out)" sign that goes by the door.

Now I'm going to see what other pictures I've got that I've forgotten about...

Whatever happened to Kitty Bartholomew?

I'm cat (Eva) and bird (Bob) sitting for Jen this weekend while she joins her siblings for a trip to Oklahoma to see a U2 concert. It's a perfect opportunity for some quality bonding time and something that I think will happen more frequently now that Jen has moved back from Los Angeles.

There are a few little projects that I'm going to do for her while I'm here...one wall in her dining room needs a paint touch up. She hung a shelf on that wall and didn't like it once it was up. She's my daughter - no question about that!

But that won't take the entire weekend. Yesterday I haunted some used book stores and a couple of thrift shops. Did not find anything I couldn't live without, however. I'm planning to give it another go, today.

Last night while I was watching television (HGTV) with Eva on my lap and Bob prancing around the living room, it occurred to me that most of the designers on these home improvement channels are incredibly young and just a little bit too perky and just a little too something-that-I-can't-put-my finger-on.

I'll admit that there are some fun to watch shows that entertain and offer good tips for updating and repairing stuff around the house. Most of them are geared toward do-it-yourselfers. I'm not knocking do-it-yourselfers...I'm one of them. But I miss shows that feature beautiful homes, gardens and renovations that you can't necessarily do yourself. I like watching shows that feature my "dream home" whatever that is. I like a little fantasy...if money were no object what could I buy?

I miss Chris Casson Madden and Kitty Bartholomew and all those great designers who used to be all the rage. They were real designers with real credentials. They gave exceptional tours of beautiful abodes...some of which I could afford but many that I couldn't. Fantasy. Dream homes. I miss that.

Was wondering what ever became of Kitty B. so I looked her up...she's still in Santa Monica in her 2000 sq. ft. cottage but it's on the market for a little more than 2 million bucks! Good for her; I hope she gets it. I can't tell you how many times I'd really think about her mantra..."It's not what you don't have; it's what you do with what you do have." And it would tweak some bit of creative genius in me. She was probably the original recycling and repurposing queen! But she did it with class.

In hunting her up I found another fun blog called Hooked on Houses. There are photos of Kitty's house in the section called Celebrity Homes. I'm going to explore all the yummy looking tabs on Hooked on Houses...

Another tab called "Are You Hooked" caught my eye. A list of questions that will help determine if you're hooked on houses...I answered "yes" to EVERY SINGLE QUESTION!

This will not surprise my hubby.

Who knows what I'll find, today.

Tissue Paper Walls and Other Ramblings...

Well, you'd never know, today, that there was that much snow yesterday! It's pretty much all gone and I'm not in the least bit sorry. It's waaaaay to early for winter to hit considering we're planning to stay home through most of it.

Jack said he hit a patch of ice and went sailing down the road sideways for a bit. Luckily he didn't tip over! Obviously nobody got in his way! But other than that, the roads were fine.

I've got big but boring plans for today and tomorrow. Painting our bedroom is tops on the list. Including the woodwork which is white. I've had trial patches of paint here and there on the walls for a month, now, and it looks like the walls are coming down with something. I don't know why choosing a paint color is so intimidating for me. Takes me forever. As I've told many a friend and child, "don't worry about it...it's only paint!" I wish I could get that through my own head.

Several years ago I textured the walls with tissue paper...yep, I did that. I went to a workshop that cost an arm and a leg and learned all sorts of faux painting techniques thinking that it would be a great business. I've done a mural or two since then but the business didn't really get off the ground. Our little town is wonderful but there's little room for that type of business.



As it happens, I learned this tissue paper technique from a magazine. And it was free, of course! Go figure. It's a pretty cool application, actually, but it took for.ev.er! It's very subtle. Here's a picture that I just took five minutes ago. Not sure if it shows the texture very well. You've gotta look close. It's a good thing that I like it because peeling all that tissue off the walls would not be fun.

So I'm off to buy my paint. It's a color called Bon Bon from Pittsburgh Paints. Hope I like it.

October Snow 2009

Nature is full of genius...so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand. - Henry David Thoreau

We woke up to snow, this morning. Big fat fluffy flakes of snow. Perfect for building a snowman or making snowballs. If I had a better sense of adventure, I'd go outside and play...but I don't. A cup of hot tea while I 'compute' appeals to me more.

There's no wind, thank goodness. It's pretty, I have to admit, but I hope it doesn't last. I'm sure it won't because it's supposed to reach into the 50's and 60's this weekend.

These are photos I took just this morning. Look how red the berries are...

Jack is on a run to the Cities for Meadow Farm and won't be back until late afternoon. Fingers crossed that the roads aren't icy. Well, I have errands to run and I need to do them in case it really turns nasty. Stay tuned...

Home again, home again, jiggity jig...

October sunset over Lake Mary

It wasn't exactly "To market, to market" but I am home again after four days in Minneapolis. It was one of those trips where I kill two (or more) birds with one stone. I love "the Cities" as Minneapolis/St. Paul is affectionately called. I am really a city girl at heart. So any excuse to go is welcomed.

Many of you already know this but for those who don't, I actually drive 2-1/2 hours to have my hair cut or whatever needs to be done to it. So, when I make that appointment I generally try to cram in enough other errands and meetings that it is worth the Fifty Bucks in gas to get there. Coming from a person who claims to be "greening" up her life, this is painful to admit. At least I'm admitting it...

I've got a ton of catching up to do now that I'm back. Couldn't access my Squidoo mailbox on Jen's computer for some odd reason. I really think I don't have it set up right but haven't had any problems until now. One more thing to try to figure out. Oh well...

So this is an October sunset over the lake. Looks like a sepia tone photograph but it's not. This is really the color. Every night looks a little different and I've got a whole collection of photos of the sunsets over the lake.

A trip to take fall photos is really in order and I think we're near peak color here. That would be a great mini-trip. Will have to talk to Jack about that...