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Halloween and other stuff

Our little friend, Corey joined Sarah, Emily, Kyle, Amber, Tyler and Steve for trick-or-treating tonight! This is a great neighborhood and everyone had so much fun! They brought home enough candy to fill a very big pinata....hmmmm. :)

Ian just asked if Gremlins are real. YES! Duh! :) They are watching that movie right now. Classic..?

My first batch of paperwork for Independent Studies with Tyler were due Friday. Innovations Academy Charter School is set up to allow for 3 day a week or 5 day a week program K-8. The idea is that you can home school part time. I opted to do the 3 day a week with Tyler but didn't make that decision until a couple weeks into the school year. Maybe that was the problem or maybe it was this teacher. Either way, I did all the paperwork wrong according to the teach which really upset me! Ask Steve as he has had to listen to me rant about it for 2 days now. I was able to contact the right person and I think things are going in a better direction now. I think. I hope. This is Kindergarten. It should not be this difficult.

I am thinking of gathering all of my recipes, methods to the madness and such into a book. Not a book for sale but I could put it on here and maybe find one of those companies that will print a small number of your book for you, (they are pretty popular in Colorado so this should be easy enough).  Maybe my kids would one day like to have such a thing. What do you think?

I am thankful for my family and all of the blessing and challenges they bring me every moment of every day!     Join us for Gratituesday at Heavenly Homemakers

Cow Talk and More Cooking

It was great to see my friend Angie at the Scripps Ranch Farmer's market this morning and to meet her husband and son. Tyler had a great time trick-or-treating as Spider man at the farmer's market. We ordered our cow and pig and I cannot wait to get them next weekend! In the process I learned a lot about grass fed cows....probably more than anyone should know. Ours was a heifer and according to Dave from Da Le Ranch she was beautiful and well rounded. I didn't ask about the pig. That was more than I needed to know! Grass fed cows have a higher amount of Omega 3 and taste sooo good! That is actually all you need to know.

Steve, Sarah, Emily and Kyle went to a Halloween/Birthday party today. Emily and Sarah were Zombie Prom Queens and Kyle was a ghost thing.  They were pretty scary!

Jacob spent the day at Scripps Ranch High School with the drama department, getting things squared away for a production there.

Ian , Amber, Tyler and I held down things at home this afternoon. I did a whole bunch of cooking!
I made enough sauce for 3 spaghetti meals, including a ton of little meatballs. I made the meatballs out of 2lbs of ground turkey, 1 lb ground beef and 1 lb Italian sausage, (bread crumbs, egg, onion, garlic, basil, oregano, sage, rosemary, A-1 sauce, salt and pepper). The meat balls were a little smaller than ping pong balls.  Into the sauce went the usual spaghetti sauce ingredients plus V-8 juice, beef broth and pureed squash and carrots.
I cooked a big batch of ground meat, turkey and beef, with onion and garlic to freeze for tacos. I brown the meat almost done in a big cast iron skillet. Then add a couple cups of water and finish cooking it. I let it cool enough to handle the pan and pour it into a strainer. When I re-heat it there won't be any fat left in it. I scoop it into freezer Ziploc bags and freeze it flat. The same with the sauce by the way. I freeze it in Ziploc bags lying flat.
Last but not least was putting as much chicken on the bone as I could squeeze into my crock pot with onion, garlic. a couple cans of chicken broth and water. I am about to go pull it off the bone now and freeze it for soup or dumplings or maybe pot pie.

We need to go get a pumpkin for carving tomorrow and maybe make some pumpkin cookies. I have a great recipe for those but I haven't made them in a long time.

The kids were playing Wii this evening for the first time in awhile. They are fun to watch! We need to get them doing that more often although the space they have to play in is rather...smallish. This can be a problem for some of the games...I don't think bowling is supposed to be a contact sport!

Elisa (my daughter who is in Colorado), told me tonight that her debit card number was stolen and someone in California made 3 ATM withdrawals totally $600. Her card itself was never missing. The bank, (Wells Fargo) is handling it and will be refunding her money to her account within 48 hours. Thank goodness!

Yesterday I rescued a Martha Washington Geranium from what will eventually be a planter box at Innovations Academy. Now I get to nurse it back to health and take it back. I also volunteered to be in charge of the Kindergarten class' planter box which doesn't even have any dirt yet. It is about 2' x 4' and 15" deep. Dirt!!! Well not yet but soon. I am hoping to be able to get Walter Anderson Nursery to donate some soil and a few plants to the project. There are actually 4 such planters and only one has anything in it....1/2 filled with a mulch sort of soil-ish stuff and a near dead geranium. This sounds like just my kind of project!