Apple Bacon Pie

What is as American as apple pie, but has the trendy flavor of bacon? That's right: apple bacon pie!

We attend an annual party called MeatFest. It is always fun to see what meaty concoctions people create.  This year we were treated to meat brownies, bacon fudge, pancake and bacon cupcakes, and chocolate covered bacon, among other dishes.  My husband added bacon to a delicious apple pie, using some frozen apples from the fall.

 He added a few fresh apples from the store.  The result was beautiful. 

* Photo credit goes to my fantastic daughter. 

The Things I Do for Scouting...

Those are coffee grinds. They are spread all over my patio to dry in the sun.  The kind people at Starbucks have been giving me their leftovers so that the 400 cub scouts in our district day camp can make dinosaur fossils with me next week.  My car, my yard, and my house smell like coffee. 

At least it's good coffee. 

And at least I finally got a sunny day with no rain. 

My husband ran out to rescue all my coffee the other day when a sudden storm caught us off-guard. Not a pretty sight!

Learning to Cook

School is out, so it is the perfect time to teach my teenager how to make some of our go-to dinners, using what we've harvested from the garden.

We started with her favorite, pesto pasta.

 Tonight we used basil (frozen in an ice cube tray from our harvest last summer), toasted pine nuts, olive oil, Parmesan cheese, and a little salt and pepper. (Nothing tastes better than fresh basil pesto, but our little basil plants are just getting started this summer.) 

Another pesto we like uses walnuts, walnut oil, and sage leaves.  Pretty much any combination of fresh herbs from the garden with toasted nuts and some oil will make a great pesto.

 

 She made a very simple salad while the noodles boiled. She tossed some fresh blueberries in a bowl of lettuce.  It doesn't get too much more simple, but it'll do.

 Making dinner is so exhausting.  Thank goodness there is time for a lie-down while the noodles keep on boiling.  If she is this tired in the kitchen now, I don't know how she'll manage making dinner after working all day when she's older.  (Add three children running around the house and maybe a cat and some chickens in the mix and I feel like having a lie-down starting every day at around 7:30 a.m.)

 Here is the plate she assembled for her littlest brother:

 Gotta love that plate.  It is by a company called "Fred". 

Here is the dinner everyone else got:

Very delicious!

Harvest Shot

It is blueberry season, which means avoiding thunderstorms and our vicious cat to pick for an hour a day.  Sweet rewards!

Land of the Little People

After a weekend of yard sales --"yard sailing"-- with the grandparents, my children typically bring home bags of toys that sellers are happy to unload.  I have more Happy Meal toys in my house than any person should, but since it is a more environmental, cost effective, and healthier way of obtaining toys than actually going to McDonald's, I try to tolerate it.  My parents thought it would be especially funny, then, to see my reaction to my son's latest yard sale find.  To their surprise, I embraced it.

 My son found a treasure in the form of several large pieces of aquarium decor.  (How big this aquarium was, I can only imagine.)  Declaring himself a huge fan of ancient Greek architecture, my son bought the whole lot for pocket change.  Many thanks go to his grandfather for demonstrating superior haggling skills on my son's behalf.

 We put the ancient ruins near this other area in our garden where Tiny Folk frequent.

 Because these items were intended to be under water, they are perfect for the outdoors.  Once the area was set up, it was only a matter of time before a battle ensued...

During the battle, the boys interacted with each other, the cat, and a slug. Great things happen when children play in the garden.  :  )

Pi Party

My teenage daughter has a birthday around Pi Day (3/14).  What better way to celebrate than with all things Pi.  I made a Pi-nata for the occasion, with some inspiration from a St. Patty's Day craft found at the Celebration Generation blog.

In addition to smashing the Pi-nata, the kids enjoyed pi-neapple, pi-zza, pi-ckles, and of course, pi-e.  I was very impressed with two of my daughter's friends showed up with pies they made themselves.  One made a delicious rhubarb pie and one girl made a strawberry pie that I smuggled away from the teens and ate by myself. 

Just kidding. 

Sort of.

It was after sunset when we finally got around to taking aim at the pinata, so some of these pictures are a bit dark.

 Below, you can see that even big kids love candy.Teenage boys can smash pinatas pretty hard, I've learned.  Candy flew several yards. I'm still finding candy in the mint bed. 

Harvest Shot

The strawberries are in!

Just when I thought it would be a bad year for strawberries, I come back from a weekend holiday and find that the slugs, the birds, and the fox did not eat all of the fruit after all.

Bee Check

We had some friends join us this weekend for a bee inspection!  It was a lot of fun.

 We removed the entrance reducer (that stick shown below on the brick).  The bees were so cute, though, and continued to enter and exit the hive from the exact spot where the hole was located in their entrance reducer.  We removed the reducer so that more air can get in and out of the hive, allowing for greater ventilation as the weather warms.

The bees are looking good!

Collecting Pollen

The bees are having a great time collecting pollen.  Judging from the queue in the picture below, we will need to widen the entrance soon.

The pollen is in little sacs on their legs called pollen baskets. Some collected orange pollen and some have collected a yellow pollen today.  Different flowers, different pollen.

In the above picture, a bee who has already deposited her collection is now departing to go get some more. Her legs are pollen-free.

Viking Birthday Party

What do Vikings like to do when someone turns 6? Throw a party, of course!

If you haven't looked for Viking birthday party supplies lately, you'd be surprised to learn that there just aren't any.  The trusty Internet also seems to have skipped the Viking theme as a viable party idea.  So, we were on our own when our youngest child announced that this year we would party like the Vikings.  Luckily, Lego and Playmobil toys make great party displays to set the mood.

For other decorations, we had to do some adapting.  Above, you'll see a Blues Clues banner that now sports a drawing of a Viking long ship taped over Blue's face.  (Making decorations provided the boys with a good outlet for the pre-party crazies.)

As you probably know, nothing beats brown paper lunch bags and some clip art when it comes to goody bags.  We stuck to candy, since clever-Viking-theme-goody-bag-junk just wasn't an option.

Our opening party activity is usually coloring, since kids can work on coloring while party guests arrive.  We found a few Viking coloring sheets online.

We made Viking shields ahead of time by cutting circles from card stock. 

Children picked a color for the shield and a color for the center circle. 

Using a Viking alphabet key, each boy found his name and glued it to his shield before decorating the shields.

When all the guests had arrived and were happily coloring and eating Viking food such as chicken nuggets and these long boat celery sticks,

we were visited by a friendly dragon who held a note in her mouth.  The note contained a quest for worthy Viking warriors and our party participants were excited to accept.

QUEST

Please help me! All of my baby dragon eggs have been stolen by a faraway kingdom. I need you to find them and save them.

For your quest, you will need

• A strong Viking hat

• A ship that can sail

• Skills to cross the rough seas

• Skills to defeat the castle of the kingdom

When you cross the rough seas and defeat the castle, you’ll surely find my eggs.

Thank you.

Be brave!

The first part of the quest involved our go-to party game, "Pin the ___ on the ___".  This time, it was "Pin the Viking helmet on the Viking", thanks to some great party props made by my oldest son.  This game never gets old.  Everyone was a winner and earned a fantastic Viking helmet.

To make ships that sail, we gave each boy a large square of aluminum foil, a skewer, and a square of paper.  The boys fashioned sails from the skewer and paper, and boats from the tin foil.  We tested each boat in a tub of water.  Admittedly, this would have been much more fun outside, but we had a rainy day and limited this part of the fun to our kitchen. Every boat was a success!

To "cross the rough seas" the boys had to make their way through an obstacle course my party helpers created in the basement.  Once again, this was intended as an outdoor party, but we made it work.  The kids had fun crawling through a tunnel, wading through a pool of stuffed animals, climbing over the couch, and shimmying under a blanket. Who wouldn't?

Now comes the part of the party in which a) the brave Vikings defeat the enemy castle, b) my older son revels in his love of catapults, and c) I find justification for the fact that I can't stop collecting wine corks.

I'm not sure why I never found this when I was a cub scout leader, but there is a wonderful tutorial online for making a simple catapult from a wire hanger.  We gave each boy a wire hanger, two rubber bands, and a plastic spoon.  With the help of my fantastic middle and high-school helpers, each boy made a catapult. 

We then shot spare corks at a castle made of corks.  (Had the weather cooperated, we would have shot ice cubes outside.)

Hidden in the castle was a note that directed us back upstairs to hunt for the hidden dragon eggs.

Once we found the eggs, we made a paper 3D dragon.  I found one online that I easily mimicked by drawing a dragon, drawing a simple wing shape, and printing both on card stock.  I cut them out ahead of time, slid the wings through a slit on the dragon shape, and the boys colored their 3D dragons, adding feathers or other decorations as they pleased. 

The dragons were fun for them to 'fly', by bouncing the wings up and down.

Finally, time for cake and opening presents!

I made the cake by inserting two chocolate covered bananas into a bundt cake.  The bundt cake was filled with a cupcake before icing.

(Yes, I removed the wrapper.)  I filled in the spaces with pieces from another cupcake.

For the family party that followed this kid-party, we enjoyed the remaining cupcakes, decorated with banana Runts and raspberry gum drops that my daughter fashioned into Viking hats. 

I am grateful to the college girl who works at the candy shop in our local mall.  She eagerly consulted with me about which candy combinations made the best Viking hat, saying that she appreciates a good challenge.

Bee Check

The bees are starting to outgrow their two-deep hive, so today we added a third box for them. 

 Above, you can see the box full of empty frames.  We added it to the top of our existing hive.

While we were in the bee yard, we took a look at how the girls are doing.  It is so nice to see that they are successfully raising a new generation.  Look closely in the picture below to see the C-shaped larvae in the comb cells. The workers feed the larvae and eventually cap the cells when the larvae stop eating.  What emerge just a few days later are honeybees, ready to work.

Chickens as Gardeners

Besides laying beautiful eggs each day for us, our chickens are fantastic gardeners.  They till one garden plot each season for us (they follow the squash garden and the Italian garden follows them), turning the soil, eating all the weeds and spent plants, and removing bugs who have overwintered in the soil.  This year, they've also agreed to monitor the pole beans for us.

Pole beans are a favorite here.  They are easy to grow, give a large yield without too much effort, and the kids enjoy the growing plants and the finished product.  We were surprised last year to find, for the first time, Mexican bean beetles on our plants.  What look like yellowy-orange lady bugs eat the leaves of the pole bean plant, thus depriving the plant of photosynthesis.  We still got beans, but much less than normal, and the plants looked really ugly with their decimated leaves.

So, what's a gardener to do?

 That's right:  bring in the chickens!

Rather than rotating the pole bean crop to a new garden with the squash and cabbage, we planted them in the same spot as last year.  Normally, that would be an invitation to the overwintered bugs for a repeat performance, but this year, the chickens are in that garden.  I installed rabbit fencing along one wall of their yard, with bamboo stakes for support (and for the pole beans to climb).  The pole beans are planted in between the rabbit fencing and the fenced wall of the yard.  So far, the chickens have not dug under the fencing. I'm *hoping* that by the time they undermine the rabbit fencing, the pole beans will be well-established.  Once the plants are tall enough, the chickens will do little damage to them.

As the plants grow, any Mexican bean beetles that emerge will become chicken food (if they cooperate with my grand scheme).  Any that appear on the leaves can be easily knocked off for the chickens...integrated pest management and organic gardening.  It will be a win/win...if it works.

*UPDATE*6/5/11
This morning I found Indigo trapped in the pole bean part of the chicken yard.  We were not in the garden at all yesterday, so we didn't notice her in there.  She seemingly dug her way under the rabbit fencing and must have spent the night in there.  Needless to say, the pole beans are all broken and/or eaten.  I planted some more today.