Needing a Spring Break

Sometimes on a dreary winter day...

...when the wind is blowing and the smell of more snow is in the air...

...I just feel the need for a Spring Break! And on days like that, the best way to get a Spring break in a hurry is to make one!

And in addition to needing a little taste of Spring, I wanted to make Malcolm something special for Valentine's day, even though it was several days after. My husband loves strawberry-rhubarb pie! 
We don't have that in Tennessee, where I grew up, so I've spent the last couple years taste testing some recipes, trying to find one that we like. I think I might have finally found a decent one. And it was so easy!

So today I thought I'd torture you a little with some mouth watering pictures, and then you'll have to run to the store to get the ingredients to make one for yourself and have your own little Spring break!

First you'll need to clean and cap the strawberries.

You can do it with a knife, but I like to use my Pampered Chef capper thing. I can't remember the name, and it might look a little different now (mine's 8 years old) but they work great for getting that nasty little hard white core out without wasting yummy red berry. See!

It also works really well on tomatoes for the same purpose!

Next step is to slice the strawberries up. For some reason I am not good at chopping and slicing things into small, even pieces, yet I like evenness. So I have gotten into the habbit of skipping the knife and cutting board on a lot of items and reaching for other tools. For nice even slices I like my Egg Slicer.

It does a marvelous job and makes them so pretty and even!

For the pie, we need 2 cups of rhubarb cut into 1 inch pieces, and 2 cups of sliced strawberries.

Put those in a bowl together with 1 cup of sugar, 3 TBS of quick-cooking tapioca, and 1/4 cup of strawberry Jello mix. Stir...and take lots of deep breaths to absorb as much of the delicious aroma as you can. Feel free to stick your nose as close to in the bowl as you dare. It smells better and better the closer you get.

Now we need a crust. I know they make the ones you buy in the freezer, or you can even buy the dough rolled up in a box, and I go that route sometimes. But mostly I've been making my own dough, because it just seems silly to buy something that's got lots of preservatives and stuff in it, when I can make one that's cheaper and better tasting. So, I mix up a batch of my Momma's Perfect Pie Crust, and it IS perfect!!! Roll it out to fit your pie plate...

...and then, after you've got the dough in the pie plate, add the strawberry-rhubarb filling. You'll also need a second dough rolled out to top the pie, but Momma's Perfect Pie Crust recipe makes enough for two pie shells so that's perfect...as the name indicates! Flute edges and vent the top and its ready for a 375 degree oven where it will bake for 40 minutes or till browned and bubbly!

And since mine was for my Valentine, I decorated the top a little, brushed it with water and sprinkled sugar on the top crust, just cause I like that sweetness on my crusts!

They say "great minds think alike" and that is SO true! Here I thought I was surprising my hubby with a Valentine pie, and he walks in the door with a dozen roses and a gift too! This all took place 4 days after the real Valentine's day. How neat that we were both thinking along the same lines on the same day.

So we pause from our baking project to trim stems...

...and gush over my flowers and Prince Charming for doing such a good job!

the box contained three Pandora charms for my bracelet...had to add that cause I know the curiosity is driving you nuts

Back to the kitchen, where I have a wad of left over pie dough. Can't let that go to waste!

I got these for free when I was a Pampered Chef consultant years ago. Never would have bought them, and never dreamed I'd use them. But I do...all the time for all sorts of things! In fact sometimes I just get them out to look at them cause they are so darn cute! 

They are perfect for making the girls cookies, and I've found lots of other uses for them. They are now my favorite little set of cookie cutters!

Left over pie dough + cinnamon sugar = afternoon snack for the chef (and a few shared with Prince Charming since he's the one who had the idea in the first place)!

After 40 minutes or so the pie is done and sitting on the counter tempting both me and Prince Charming, but we make ourselves be good and wait till after dinner, because we know it will taste lots better without burnt and scalded tastebuds.

A quick clean up, thanks to my rolling mat which keeps the bulk of the flour and pie dough off of my counter...

...and also due to my excellent kitchen helpers who are always willing to get involved in the clean up!

We did manage to wait till after dinner, and it was very much worth the wait! This was the perfect little Spring break that I had been needing!

If you can come up with an excuse to make this, I say go for it. And really, who needs an excuse? But if your weather is anything like mine is right now, that's all the excuse you need. I made that pie on a gloomy Friday afternoon. And we'll be having the final pieces of it this evening as we look out our window at a white world.

Yep, it snowed over night, about 2 inches, and its been coming down ever since. The tips of the grass blades are slowly dissappearing in my yard. So if ever there was a need for a taste of Spring, its today!

While making my pie, I used a lot of my Pampered Chef toys! They just make cooking that much more fun for me! I love cooking tools! Don't forget about our Blogger Pampered Chef party! Your all invited and so are your friends, and their friends, and friends of the friend's friends! Just forward it along to everyone!

I see the birds have returned to my empty feeders. They are fluttering past my window wondering why I havn't resupplied them yet. So I better get to it! Hope the week ahead is a snuggly warm and blessed one for you!

Hoppers

I was just "cleaning out" my camera and realized I never finished up with my home time post. So, let me do that now!Recently there were two kinds of hoppers in my life.
This kind....

and this kind...

When we got home after a long absence, we discovered that indeed the yard needed mowing..badly. And that we had been infested with grasshoppers. I have seriously never seen that many grasshoppers in one place at one time. And it wasn't necessarily just our yard. It was the entire area all the way into Billings. It made me think of the Biblical plagues in Egypt. I can now imagine how truely horrible that must have been!

Just walking across the yard would stir up a cloud of the crunchy things, dozens of them trying to escape our feet. I know they are crunchy because they were all over the porch and side walk and you could hardly walk without stepping on them.  What's even more gross....Ella and Paris loved making a game of hunting them, which was fine, until they also decided to snack on them once the hoppers were caught.

They were also all over my flowers. I was delighted to discover that I had three hollyhocks and three sunflowers volunteer to come back this year, even though they knew from last summer they'd be on their own.

Unfortunately the grasshoppers were delighted with them too. Their lower leaves were nothing but stems, and during the cool mornings, my poor sunflower was weighted down with hoppers.

Normally I don't mind grasshoppers, even enjoy them to some extent, but this was a little extreme.

And let me just go ahead and tell you, mowing the yard...well I had more than one take a giant leap to escape the lawn mower and land down the neck of my shirt. There was quite a bit of squirming and frantic flapping of my shirt while I got the back yard mowed.

Amazingly they didn't come in the house with us, except for a handful that got a free ride. I repotted a plant, sprayed it off with the hose b/c it was dusty, and left it on the porch to dry, foolishly forgetting the hoppers. Later that evening, after I had returned the plant to my kitchen floor, I was fixing dinner and I noticed Paris and Ella staring into the plant with a hypnotized kind of glaze in their eyes. At first I was going to fuss because they have been known to snack on this plant a bit, but then I suddenly had a horrible vision in my mind, and ran to the plant....and sure enough. It was full of grasshoppers. I whisked it back out onto the porch as quickly as possible, and thought I'd managed to prevent any escapes, but the next morning I found one of the beasts on the hallway wall. He found himself quickly tossed out the back door.

I'm hoping they will be gone when we get home for our next break, and I imagine that will be the case. Its certainly cooling off out here, and I saw on the radar this morning that NW Washington will be getting some snow in their mountains over the next couple days. Yep...summer is over in our part of the country. Its time for our two weeks of fall and then the snow will fly! Well that's a bit of an exaggeration...but not much of one.

Have you picked up your copy of the Pioneer Woman's cookbook yet?

I swear I've only run into two recipe's that were just so-so instead of fabulous, and I've tried quite a few of them. This time home I made this one...

...and loved it. This is her pizza crust recipe with her tomato basil pizza. I won't share the recipe because its hers, but I will tell you it uses pesto instead of pizza sauce and Malcolm and I both loved it! No more boxed pizza for me! You need to get her cookbook because as the title suggests. The Pioneer Woman Cooks!

Amidst the cleaning and straightening frenzy preparing to list the house for sale, I did get a little relaxing done. I caught up on all my So You Think You Can Dance episodes that I had DVR'd. I am so addicted to that show! Love it!

And I also did a little porch sitting/nature watching. I do love my songbirds.

Its already been 2 weeks since we left the house and returned to work. It will be a few more till we return home again, but with the coming of fall and the anticipation of winter, I'm enjoying my time out on the road this time around...well what little time we've actually been on the road! The hotel time wasn't so cool!

One evening at home we had a spectacular sunset...

...the kind you usually see in fall and winter. Somehow the sunsets have different looks seasonally, or at least it seems so to me. And so I think that started me on this "its fall....yippee!" kick. I never get tired of a Montana sunset!!!

We're in Helm, CA this morning and just finished unloading our load of feather meal. We're supposedly reloading in Livingston and heading over to Ogden, UT. But Malcolm plans to talk to our broker this morning and see if he can send us through Billings somehow or if he wants us to go to Ogden and then put our truck in the shop in Salt Lake City. Its not feeling well, and we're still loosing power and it was making weird sputtering noises this morning. Cross your fingers that its a quick find and a quick fix!

Being a Temporary HomeKeeper and Playing Cowgirl

Hard to believe we've already been on the road for a week after our last home time. Sometimes it seems that time just crawls out here, and sometimes it flys by. We're intending to work through till the end of May when we'll go home for Malcolm's sister's high school graduation. Thats almost 2 months. Lets hope it goes by quickly! Of course if it doesn't we'll still have a few fly by stops probably like we usually seem to get. Those are much needed. I know for sure we'll have one because we have to get back to sign our taxes before the 15th.

As stated before, we had a marvelous, fun, relaxing time at home, and also spent a little time at the ranch. The girls and I started our home time out by catching up on laundry...always a big job after numerous weeks out on the road. I could do laundry on the road, but I just don't like to. For one thing, its boring sitting around waiting on it, and those public washers just give me the wllies...not to mention they take forever to get stuff dried...and cost a ridiculous amount. Enough on that. I'd rather wait and have mountains of it to deal with at home. This was just part of it. The rest was upstairs waiting to be hauled and sorted.

The girls love laundry time because the laundry room, for some reason, stays really warm. Its their sleeping room, and they love when I'm working in there. They wallow in the laundry, and chase each other around, using their kennel as base.

Speaking of their kennel, I made them a new bed while we were home. Its pink and black leopard print fau fur. Its a little poofy, but they are working on getting it squished down into a nice bed.

I also baked bread, made my sister and her boyfriend's daughter matching aprons for her birthday, cleaned the bathrooms and wood floors (something I've neglected for months), and just generally did homey things and soaked it all up. We only saw snow on one day, the day after we got home, and it melted by that afternoon. Overall the weather at home was mild, sunny, and almost springlike!

While I worked inside, Malcolm worked outside. He took advantage of the mild weather and fertilized the yard and pastures.We live up in the hills northeast of Billings and its very dry. Last summer we tore out a retaining wall and it looks much better, but left us grassless in the back yard. We were overjoyed to see that this spring the grass is slowly making a comeback, and he thought it wouldn't be a bad idea to help it along some. We're also considering selling the house and moving (more on this later) so it would look better if we actually had some grass...and it was green and lush, or at least as lush as it can get up there. So fertilizer should give it a nice boost. And as soon as he finished this, it started a very gentle sprinkling of rain that came and went all day. Perfect for soaking it all into the ground.

He also spent his time tinkering in the shop, running a few errands in town, and playing with his guns. The truck had been turned into Kenworth as soon as we got home for some warranty work and an overhead (they do that at 100,000 miles..go through the engine and truck and get everything adjusted and back into spec), so he wasn't able to work on it every living moment that we were home. I was grateful that he was forced to stay away from the truck. He was too. He needed that.

This studly fellow moved in down the road. I'm not a big paint fan, but he has caught my affection with only one glimpse. I think he's a blue roan paint, which I had not seen before. He also had a girlfriend that he was in hot pursuit of. I'm looking forward to seeing him after he slicks out for summer, and also curious to see what his offspring look like. His girlfriend is some kind of draft cross, or light draft.


After nearly a week at home, we loaded up the pickup one morning and headed to the ranch south of Baker. I love this drive. I love leaving Billings behind me and heading into eastern Montana. It feels like coming home. Its convenient living near Billings, but I left my heart in eastern Montana when we moved a year and a half ago.

Paris and Ella love going to Malcolm's parent's. Carlie has always been kind of edgy about it. She usually stresses out and stops eating when we are anywhere other than home or in the truck. But this time she seemed to settle right in and I think she had a good time. They love ripping around on the living room carpet, snuggling with Malcolm's mom, and laying in front of the gas stove. Paris and Carlie Jean discovered a new place to enjoy the fires warmth...my girls always like heights for some reason.Malcolm had some rifle's at his parents and got them out to look at them before packing them up to bring them home. He made the mistake of leaving the case open and the princess, apparently too good to lay on the carpet like the others, insisted on making a bed of the gun case. Only she could have gotten away with this. She's too cute for her own good.I didn't catch it before, but a friend of mine pointed out that she's wearing her camo shirt too. How appropriate!

She gets away with a lot of things because of her cuteness. Things like this...

She's tall enough to see over the edge of the table anyway, but she discovered that she could stand on the treadmill that's right there and get a GOOD view of everything that we were eating or drinking. This became here permanent position for every meal, snack, or general gathering around the table, for the entire visit.

The trip to the ranch wasn't all about visiting and fun and games. Well I guess that depends on who you ask. I enjoyed it all as fun and games but I'm sure that my sister-in-law felt differently. And these guys probably did too.

Shoshoni and Dandi. They were wondering who I was, why they were left standing in the barn with me, and what was going on. Rachelle had left to go tag some calves with her Dad before we moved them, and the boys and I were hanging out in the barn waiting. This was actually day two of moving pairs, so they probably new what was up, but I'm sure they were wondering why we weren't getting to it.

I've not had a lot of experience moving or working cows, but I enjoy every chance I get. I only hope I'm learning and not getting in the way too much. Sometimes I feel like I'm more of a burden than help, and I know on one occasion I created more work, because I let a cow and calf get away and they went down in a low spot and Rachelle couldn't get them out. Oh well...they just got a little longer with the herd, but eventually came up and were pushed into the other pasture with the rest of the pairs.

It was cool and cloudy and on day two as we were finishing up, the wind got stronger and colder. But it could have been worse weather, and we were all bundled up for it. I had fun, and though I was sore for days afterwards, it was very much worth it! I have so much fun working with Rachelle and she's very good at teaching without loosing patience. Maybe one day I'll actually be a help to her.

My father-in-law was fixing some fencing that the snow had weighed down over the winter, but later on he came in and helped us with some stubborn pairs. We also left a few of the more aggressive mothers for him to deal with on the four-wheeler.

While he was fencing and we were moving pairs, Malcolm was working with his D-7 Cat. The neighbor had just finished working on the tracks which had been loose sense we bought it. It was like a new machine! He used it to clean the lot for his Dad.

By the time he was finished he had created quite a mountain of poo. The hill above is after the first days work. He worked on it a second day till mid-afternoon. The pile was so big you could see it from the road, a mile away. I told them they should put a flag on top. His Dad said he was thinking of putting his windsock up there.

While Malcolm and I were outside in the chilly damp working, the girls were inside with my mother-in-law who continued the trend of spoiling them. She moved the dog bed over by the door so they could nap, watch for us to go by, and rub the coziness of the house in the barn cats nose.

After getting cleaned up, we all headed to town for dinner. They had some errands to run in town, and after dinner they got to it, and we headed home.

At home we finished some things up. I had to finish the laundry we created while we were at home and at the ranch, gather things together to put back in the truck, and other odds and ends. I also had to bake another batch of cookies for the girls. I have become unsatisfied with all the store bought treats. They just seem so...un-nutritious. So last summer I bought this book. I've only tried a couple of recipes, but they are all HUGE hits! The apple muttins were a big success, but so far these gingersnaps are the favorite.

Ella will do anything for a gingersnap, and thinks she gets one every time she takes position in the passenger seat for her turn at co-pilot. And of course she does get one every time. Here she is waiting in the kitchen as I rolled out the dough. I honestly think she knew what I was making because she doesn't usually hover in the kitchen...at least not quite so much.

That's the reason I had to make more. The recipe makes about 150, but I was running low from the last batch. The things taste pretty good too! (yes I tried one) Kind of bland, but not too bad. They are made from organic oat and rice flour and have molasses, ginger, cinnamon, honey, and some other good ingredients in them.

Picked up the truck the next evening. It didn't get done till later in the afternoon, so Malcolm didn't get to work on it till Sunday morning. He got up early, and replaced air filters and did something to the trailer, though I forget what it was. It didn't take long, and by noon we were on our way to load in Billings and head to Nebraska.