Guilty Pleasures

Like my new salad tongs? I do! As halloween being one of my most favorite holidays I just felt like walking down the seasonal isle of Target and found these beauties! It's the small things in life, right?!

Mad skills

So mad, I might be a little crazy. 

MUAH HA HAHA!

This is my attempt at making a cake.  Grandma instructed me on how to make the clown, curly Q's and flowers.  You like? You want a clown cake for your birthday? OK! I can do it! hahaha

Ivy Hill Farm (aka the Pig Farm)

For the past couple of weeks I have been taking care of my infidels, uh I mean invalid family.  My grandma and my mom both had surgery so I went down to Maryland to help out.  Grandma's arm was cut up pretty bad to get all of the cancer out.  Her skin was so tight that if it swelled or if it was bumped the stitches would just pop open.  So I spent my days (and nights) with her and we had a blast.  For the first week she was under house arrest but once that was over we decided to go on a drive to the Orchard my grandma has been going to for the past 40 years and get out of the house.

Luckily we got there on the first day of the cider season.  Delicious.  No Preservatives, just raw cider straight from the press. If you have never had cider like this you need to try some.  Do not go to the grocery store and think it is the same stuff, it's not.  Go to an orchard that has a cider press near your house and get some.  This stuff is pure heaven and starts to get alcoholic after a week.  So if you get a gallon you gotta drink it fast.

Oh! and I almost forgot. We had some of the slushie cider!  I think I have found a new love in life! 

This red basket is what the apple pickers wear when they are harvesting the apples off of the trees.  And they get lots of apples!

After they pick them they take the crates and lift it onto the gutter thing

Which leads them down the sorting things and they get washed and smashed.

They had huge mums for sale for $5.  Just so you know these ones are usually $15-20 in the stores.  So my Grandma and her friend Alice stocked up.

We ended the trip with a lunch at Cozy and then drove back home.

:)

The grapes of wrath

I don't know if any of you remember me mentioning that we had grapevines in the back yard.  I watched my friend Angie make grape juice last year and unfortunately for her she had to ship grapes in from Utah in order to make it.  So I decided to take advantage of my situation and make me some free grape juice. Granted they are not those purple grapes from Concord, MA but they are good enough.  Yum yum!

 I picked four gallons of grapes and there was still a lot left on the vines.

Rinsing them off

Bubbles! My bubbles!

Then i mushed em

And boiled em 

And strained them.

 I did it without a juicer I might add, just a piece of cheesecloth.  Try that for extra culinary street cred.  Just sheer blood sweat and tears...  Well maybe just sweat.  It was pretty hot

Sanitizing the jars

I don't have a canning pot and the biggest pot I had BARELY covered the tops of the jars.  I had to keep filling the pot up with water to the to keep the tops covered in water.  The boiling water kept splashing out of the pot and put out the fire on my stove three times by the time I was done.

Filling the jars.

Here's question for all of you canning people... What does the "canning rack" do?  I didn't have one so I crumpled and punched holes through an aluminum pie pan and put it in the bottom of my pot.  It seemed to work, nothing went wrong but I just wonder if I could have done without and had just a little more room.

Reboiled and FINISHED!  I ended up with 10 jars of wonderful vacuum-packed grape juice! I'm so proud of them I don't know if I will be able to eat them.  I think i will just look at them, forever.  *sigh*

Another ghostly adventure

We went to an old cemetery on park street near the commons. Creepy, old tombstones made it perfect for taking pictures. Many were very decorated while others like Paul Revere's weren't at all. Even though it rained, making us cold and wet, we enjoyed our time with the dead. 

I really liked the motifs on all the headstones.  There were  dead cherubs, winged skulls, and just plain old skull and crossbones. 

Boston's old mother goose's tombstone

Paul Revere's tombstone

John Hancock, Ben Franklins parents and Samuel Adams tombstone and memorial

Ipswitch

Our neighbors Delys and John invited us to go up to Ipswitch with them.  We went and it was a really nice beach.  I thought it was funny that the beach advertise themselves as a "white sands beach". It wasn't really that white, it was the same as Maryland's beaches.  But compared to the rest of the Boston area I guess it really is a white beach.

We thought this little crab was cute.  Unfortunately he was dead.  Here is a random side note: the beach near our house has hundreds of hermit crabs in the water.  So if you want one it's very easy to get them.  But for those of you unfamiliar with a hermit crab they aren't much bigger than this little guy here.  So don't worry about being pinched.  

Our neighbors