I Heart Fall!

Aside from being detained in Canada and my 3 hour interrogation at the US border October has been a great month! I love fall and have been enjoying the cooler weather! I love watching the leaves on the trees change color. Mr drive to and from Canada was beautiful with all of the trees in the mountains. I wish I had pictures to share but decided that was a little unsafe while I was driving and I was always to anxious to get to my final destination to make a stop! Before I left for Montreal Daniel and I did take some time to go down to the Botanical Gardens and take a walk around. Here a couple pictures from then:

At the beginning of the month for our date night we decided to go apple picking! I found an apple and pear orchard 30 minutes from our place in Garfield WA. We went after Daniel was done school one day. We misjudged how early it got dark though so by the time we got there it was already dusk. We had about 20 minutes to pick as many apples as we could. Thanks to our mad picking skills we picked 90 pounds of apples! That was a bit more than we were planning on but it was pretty hard to judge how much we had picked while we were in the process. We picked 4 varieties: Macintosh, Spartan, Liberty and Golden Delicious. They were so yummy!

I bought an apple peeler/slicer/corer to process some of the apples and froze them for baking and then I took some up to Welling where my Mom and I made applesauce! We used an apple sauce machine which made it really easy! You just wash the apples, quarter them, boil them and put them in the machine and then can the apple sauce. Yum! We have been enjoying it on our pancakes!

Another fun project my Mom helped me with during my time in Welling was bottling dried beans in a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers have always scared me but I feel fairly confident now that it is something I could do on my own. I am trying to be a little healthier in my cooking and develop good eating habits. I decided I better start now so that by the time our kids are eating the same food as us they will hopefully learn to like some of these healthier meals!

 

We canned red kidney, pinto, garbonzo, navy, and black beans. So far we have tried the black beans in 2 dishes and I must say they taste much better than canned beans from the store! Can't wait to try the rest.

And to finish off I did get around to some baby projects this month. I will share one of my favorites which was a little boy tie!