Days go by and the Boss cooks dinner

Time flies when you're ~ (fill in the blank).

It's that crisp fall-like air that puts me in the mood to bake, and since it's too early for fruitcake it's time to get out the pumpkin loaf mix. This mix is so perfectly spiced - very mellow but flavorful and nicely moist. We add chopped pecans when we bake it.

It's a bit spendy at ~ $6/box but makes 2 loafs. I got it at Walmart.

Also on the cooking front, Ed tried his hand at a couple of new recipes he saw that peaked his interest; a Spinach Chicken Casserole with Sundried Tomatoes, Cream Cheese and Mozzarella, and Garlic Parmesan Sweet Potatoes as the side. He didn't need any significant help, other than where certain spices were or where to find the baking pans. It all baked @ 400° for around 30 minutes or so.  Wow! So delicious, and such a treat to try something new. It's definitely going into the rotation.

He used chicken breast cutlets and made a half recipe.

Here's a link to the Chicken recipe if you want to give it a shot - so yummy! 👏😋 (Of course, their picture of the finished dish is picture perfect, haha).

Spinach Chicken Casserole (site is eatwell101.com)

We got the pontoon boat splashed and the Boss has made a few rounds on it. Our lake is only 9 acres but still a fun paddle and can be strenuous.

Pontoon boat ready to go

Heading upwind for the exercise, then an easy paddle back.

I've been playing around with my wire wrapping jewelry this week. All summer I was without my supplies, so I was excited to try my hand at it again. Here are a couple of pendants I made - I'm happy with them!

Ruby Zoisite with Jade beads on the left,
and a Rhodochrosite with Copper beads.

Amazonite on the left with Copper & Jade beads
and on the right Rainbow Sea Sediment Jasper & Copper beads.

A couple of days ago, my friend Liz up in Rustic sent me a message announcing the first snowfall of the year. She was nice enough to send a few pics too, plus one from our Reolink camera.

Brrr, prettier on the earlier shot with a bit of sunlight on it, more foreboding later in the day.  I guess a lot of folks are getting some of the white stuff this week, part and parcel with the season.

Well, one last shot to close out this post - a hearty smoked sausage, cabbage and veggie stew. Perfect with some broiled garlic/herb toast.

We love these stews, and they made for an easy meal.

Thanks for dropping by, and be sure to check back in a while.

Typical Fall doings, cooking, fabric fun, and football

 We've been home now for a few weeks and have been getting back into the groove around here by doing some cleaning and shopping, plus having some good chit-chats with my neighbors.

I have also been adding to my trivet "tubie" stash, as if I needed to - on the way back home I occupied myself in the passenger's seat by stuffing polyfill into empty "tubies". Boy, did I end up with a pile, in fact, I actually bought more polyfill during the trip, lol! The Boss likes to handle the driving and I think he found that having my hands occupied shut me up quite nicely - win/win. 😂

Getting plenty of supplies ready for football season.

I'm also restocking the freezer with easy meals & sides, plus all my "timesavers"; sauces, salsas, stock, raw chopped veggies like onions, peppers plus sauteed mushrooms. I keep my buttermilk frozen in 1 cup batches, it thaws easily and works great for cornbread. I save a lot of time and money by storing this stuff in the freezer instead of letting it moulder in the fridge.

One of the first things I did was prepare and fry up a ton of meatballs, like maybe 75?!  One of the most well-liked meals around here is spaghetti & meatballs, probably the Boss's favorite, so I wanted to get a big batch of that made up. When I portion it up for the freezer I put 12 meatballs and an adequate amount of sauce into each container. This gives us 2 meals of 3 meatballs each, hey, 2 no-brainer meals, I love it! 😏 Here's what the ingredients look like before final prep.

Now that's going to be a *bunch* of sauce!

Meanwhile, the Boss has been getting the pontoon boat parts out and prepped for assembly. He's looking forward to getting some lazy rowing in on the lake.

A few more bits and bobs and it'll be ready to launch.

We had one of our stunner sunrises this morning. These really strut their stuff during the cooler fall/winter weather. They don't last long - maybe 10 minutes max, but boy, what a show.

This started out deep reddish-pink, but had progressed
to yellow as the sun is just getting ready to poke up.

Last night I made pizza to enjoy during the (recorded) Tennessee - Alabama game - Roll Tide! A bit of a slow start but they got it done. It's a deluxe with pepperoni, italian sausage, mushrooms, onions, bell pepper, black olives, capers and 2 kinds of cheese. The shot was taken before the top layer of cheese was added. YUM!

One dinner and a couple of lunches for sure.

Storage for my trivets can be a problem. I like to look at them before they get sold and go away, so putting them in a box just doesn't work for me. I set up a mounting system on one of my craft room walls. I used an aluminum flat tie with 3 rows of chain and shower curtain hooks and it works great. I'll show you.

Well, that's about it for now. Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you have a great day! See you next time. 😎

Things are chugging along and a new toy

 Well here we are well into 2022 and things are just chugging along as per usual - thank goodness. We're all healthy, we've got good food to eat and the weather is just about perfect. So far we haven't done much in the way of dismantling Christmas. We're still enjoying the cheerful twinkle lights of our trees, but yesterday our outside lights came down until next year.

On New Year's Day we had a traditional dinner of baked ham, black-eyed peas, collards, rice and cornbread and boy, was it great. A large meal like this is best served mid-day (2pm-ish) we think and gives us plenty of time to digest while putting away leftovers, cleaning up the kitchen and dishes. I tried to do a bit of decorating to make the table more New Year's and less Christmas. 

New Year's Meal and spruced-up table.

7.5# shank potion ham waiting to be turned into leftovers -YAY.

The ham came out great and it's such a treat to cook one and have several packages of ham in the freezer for good meals in the future.

Ok, what is this new toy you were talking about?  A Colorado brand 9' Pontoon boat for rowing around on our lake. Wow! It went together quite easily and we'll all look forward to getting a little fresh air and exercise on our 9 acre lake. It's amazing how different it looks from water level as opposed to our deck level.

He's trying it out first.
Heading toward the islands at the south end .

At rest at the dock. Should be fun!

Still baking cookies, the lemon/ginger/almond ones were very popular around here, so I made another batch of them. So good with a cup of hot tea after dinner. You use a lemon cake mix as the base and go from there. Tasty to say the least.

It doesn't make a lot, but they did fill up 2 cookie tins. 😁

Another funny thing from my kitchen - I've always loved the longevity of Roma tomatoes, it almost seems like they can hang-out on the counter just pleasantly ripening up, but then you glance at it and see this - LOL!

Yikes! - Alien alert!