My favorite time of year...

"It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn."  -- B.C. Forbes

Usually, each year, we get a nice little haul of acorn squash, which are
perfect for making pumpkin soup.

I cut them open, remove the seeds....

...bake them, and remove the orange flesh from the dark green shell.

I puree the squash in the food processor and then freeze it to use later.
See? There's the orange good stuff in the upper right hand corner of the freezer.
The purple stuff on top of it? Pureed red beets, which are perfect for
chocolate cake.

 I made Asian-style pulled pork using cranberry juice, our own hot pepper jam,
hoisin sauce, ketchup, ginger, liquid smoke, soy sauce, our own garlic and
red onions, and cornstarch. It looks like a hot mess here, but once it cooked
down, it was *so* good. We ate it over cooked sweet potato chunks.

Look at our bean haul! They're in the jars and tupperware containers
around the crockpot.

There's my handsome beekeeper, coming down from bee hill.

The boyz are restless because Dad is outside. Eventually, when I was
downstairs folding laundry, they 'nose-pried' the door open and ran out to Michael.

We got some beautiful apples from McDannell Fruit Farm in Biglerville, PA,
which we always try to stop at on the way home from visiting my folks.
What is this? An apple crostata! Click here for the receipe.

Michael's putting the garden to bed.

And I made some apple crisp for tomorrow's breakfast.

The gorgeous fall reds, oranges, and yellows continue to spread across the hill.

 

Autumn has come....

The colors (and smells) of fall are very welcome here after such a scorching summer. After months of daily watering, after a period during which our empty rain barrels forced Michael into making seemingly endless trips back and forth to Lick Run Creek with many (many, many) buckets, it's so nice to see the cooler temperatures, feel the rain, and smell the new crisper edge to the outdoor air. Indoors, it smells different, too, since we're dehydrating habaneros. They have a distinct, pleasantly warm scent that has permeated the entire house. Outside, the wild turkeys and the deer are milling through the field below the beehives.
Winter preparation continues. Yesterday, I spent several hours on the back door and door jamb, which I haven't touched since 2007. The white paint had begun to peel and crack. This morning, however, it has a glossy new coat of butter yellow paint. Some pictures appear just below:

The back porch door before its new paint job....

...and the door after the new paint job.
The Hex Sign (which had actually been on the door before) is there
because hey, I'm a Pennsylvania Dutch girl. The image is a
"Double Distlefink," symbol of good luck and happiness, doubled.

Each day, the orange blaze travels further across the trees on the hillsides.

This morning, despite the intermittently heavy rains, the wild turkeys are
out foraging on the hill below the bee hives.

While I write this, Jasper is snuggling by my side. What a nice feeling it
is to have a dog snoring beside you.

Monster Sweet Potatoes, Bean-shelling by Candlelight, and Other Stories...

Look at these monster sweet potatoes--they're the size of
a baby's head! This makes up for all the years of no
sweet 'taters at all.

Before going into the oven, I chopped and tossed them
in olive oil, pepper, a garlic seasoning mix, and salt.

...and here they are after 30 minutes in the oven, with a quick stir
at the 15 minute mark.

Now, pair them with fresh salad greens, Guz tomatoes, and ranch dressing.
Now that's what I call dinner.

Here, I've salted eggplant slices, and they're draining in a collander before
getting a rinse and spending 20 minutes in the oven.



We have had a banner bean year. And we've been shelling each night.
Pictured here are:
1) kidney beans
2) holstein beans
3) cow peas

 

All of Savannah's cookie sheets are in use around here lately. These
two have Christmas Beans and Cherokee Trail of Tears (a black bean).  

Our dehydrator is out and working, starting tonight.
On the top level are some gorgeous, bright orange habaneros.

The hot peppers, too, have been prolific. We have hot banana peppers,
habaneros, hot wax peppers, and jalapenos, among several other types.
Look! Savannah's piggies are also present.

...and in this box are sweet peppers of various kinds, mostly the bell
variety, but a few Hungarian wax peppers, too. Oh, and piggies. My feet look
different in photographs. Who knew? 

The power went out for about a half hour around 8:15, so Michael
and I shelled beans by candlelight. It was actually very romantic...well,
as romantic as bean shelling can get. Here, Bun is making a funny face
and spreading out paper to catch all the bean casings.

Fred is a bean freak. Usually, he hides beneath the coffee table
and emerges, blinded by the table cloth over his eyes, pushing
his muzzle up towards the place where my hands are shelling.
Sometimes I feed him a bean, but too many makes for...
well, let's say, "explosive loads in the tunnel", to quote a sign
I've seen near the tunnels in Pittsburgh.

Bean shelling with ambiance, no?

Beets, Swank Bathrooms, Schnauzer Beefcake...

Because of the hot weather this July, we're only now getting harvest enough to can. Usually, we've got the fans going and the kettles boiling starting in mid-July. But this year, a good bit of the harvest happened just before our vacation (which had us scurrying to get everything put up so nothing spoiled the week we were away). Now, things are somewhat more leisurely. I say somewhat because now we're putting garden and bee hives to bed. Soon the first frosts will hit, and we need to be prepared.

Michael puts the beets in the boiling water canner.

Michael, filling jars with Oxblood red beets. And when we say
Oxblood, we mean, like red stuff everywhere.

See the red stuff? And not just in the bowl...it looked
like a crime scene around the sink, where we dumped the
water we boiled these babies in.

And for those that just didn't fit into the jars, they got a good whirring
in the food processor. Can you say, chocolate cake, boys and girls?
Yes, these will very likely end up in chocolate cake with peanut
butter frosting.

Okay, yesterday, I promised pictures of a Greenbrier bathroom, and I use the indefinite article "a" because I only thought to photograph one of them. There were more. Oh, there were many more. Some that had apparent flecks of gold in their granite countertops, bathrooms lit entirely by chandeliers, bathrooms with built in garbage cans and tissue boxes and little hand towels that didn't feel disposable (but were, thank goodness. I mean, ew?) Anyway, I promised and now I deliver:

Just one of the bathrooms at the Greenbrier in
White Sulphur Springs, WV....each doorway along
this hall leads to a small room with a vanity table
and toity. Each one has a door that closes. At the end of
this hallway is a conversation area (see the next pic!)

The conversation area at the end of the hallway above. I suppose this
is where all ladies go to powder their noses, although each bathroom "stall"
(cough) suite itself had a vanity table to powder ones appendages at.



Fred says that all this discussion of luxury is very
tiring. "A little grass, a little masonry work, or
the dust ruffle on Grandma's bed, and  you know, I
can work with that. Who wants to tinkle on marble?"



Michael and Savannah on the move....

Michael and I were on vacation at the beginning of September, as part of our annual anniversary trip. Of course, true to my usual form with the photo uploader, I've got these pictures out of order, and I can't seem to correct it. However, here's a little pictorial.What's missing (and will appear in another post later) is our stop at my Mom and Dad's and pictures of the Greenbrier, which we visited our first day in Lewisburg, West Virginia. We took a bunker tour, and walked through rooms oppulently (if eccentrically) deocrated by Dorothy Draper (I have bathroom pictures on my phone, which will appear here soon...I know, you're thinking, "Pictures of the bathroom, girl? Are you kidding?" Hey, this isn't just any bathroom. Each stall was a luxury suite on par with, if not slightly above, the bathrooms at Harrod's in London). But more on this later....in the meantime....pics, pics, pics

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's home, in Charlotteville, Virginia.
It was our first stop on our way to vacation....

Oooo! Now we're suddently in Greenbank, WV. Depicted here is the the 2-acre
wide sattelite at the National Radio Observatory (NRO).
This was as close as we were permitted to get with the digital camera. In
the so-called "Quiet Zone" around the NRO any digital signal is
banned so that it does not interfere with their search for and investigations
of space frequencies.

Michael at Droop Mountain,standing with one hand on the 14th
Pennsylvania Cavalry sign.



Droop Mountain's Overlook Tower



Us in the Droop Mountain Tower.



Look! We're back in Charlottesville again.
(%^#@& pic uploader. Why you no work?)
 Michael at Monticello in front of a huge tulip
tree that they removed to protect the house from
damage.



Me in front of the fish pond at Monticello. This is where
they put the fish caught elsewhere that would eventually
end up on the Monticello table.

The gorgeous gardens at Monticello

Michael in front of more of the beautiful Monticello gardens!

Okay, now we're in Cass, West Virginia, where we got on
Shay Engine #6 and rode to Bald Knob with a stop at Whittaker Station.

Michael and me on the open train car.



The beautiful landscape we traveled through. We were out from about 12-5.



The Cass Company Store station. Logging once kept Cass a going concern
until the late 60s/early 70s.

Michael at the Bald Knob overlook tower. The view was
pretty amazing, and we could see the NRO sattelite from
there, even though it was 4 miles away.