Pumpkins (2012 Edition)

Posted on by Jordan

It’s been a surprisingly busy weekend here!

Friday night, Heather and I went with some friends to a special worship event put on by a church in the area. The theme was vaguely bluegrass, but it appears that just giving an electric guitar player a banjo doesn’t alter the style of the music as much as one might have expected. That being said, it was a fun evening, and they had a great worship team.

Saturday morning, Heather headed down to the capital to participate in the annual breast cancer awareness walk. She had a great time, and was happy to discover that her friends from the office were more than happy to set a pace that accommodates someone 32 weeks pregnant.

At the same time, I headed out to the building our church is slowly working to clean up for a new location. The good news with that project is that the demolition is nearly done, and the city has nearly figured out all the kinks in the permit issuance process. I still managed to get completely covered in cobwebs and dust in no time! It appears that we are going to clean by simply hauling dust out one shirt load at a time 🙂

Heather and I then met up to head to the Habitat “restore” to see about getting some flooring to use in building a photography studio style backdrop she had seen online. We found something that might work, along with some other odds and ends Heather thought might be useful.

When we got home, we proceeded to spend the next few hours cleaning up (this line may make a new low in mundane things I typed into the blog… ah well)

Some friends came over that night to carve pumpkins, and brought their newly born daughter!

Heather was happy to take breaks from carving to entertain her, and by the time the night was done I had managed to rock her to sleep in my arms for a while (the baby, not Heather)

As a small tangent we discovered that, for larger cuts, a “keyhole saw” is wildly superior to a knife! I also had rigged a handle onto a jigsaw blade, and we found it surprisingly easy to maneuver around the tight corners of our designs. The end results were something everyone was proud of, and I think that’s all we can ask for 🙂

Sunday nearly kept pace with how our weekend stared. After church, Heather had back-to-back photo sessions for friends, and then spent the evening working on her “Initials project” (more on that in an upcoming post!) I wasn’t quite as busy, but built stands for the backdrop we shopped for on Saturday, and finished prepping a bench thing we have such that it can be recovered.

I keep saying that the impending approach of the baby is going to slow our weekend pace down… so far it hasn’t, but there is still time I suppose 🙂

 

-Jordan

Somehow Fall Snuck Up On Us

Posted on by Jordan

It has been another full weekend, for Heather and I.

I started off camping with the scouts, on a trip that included a bike ride

As you can see we brought a lot of bikes along.

The ride was along the trails north of Des Moines. The same trails that lead up to the bridge we rode over back at the beginning of summer. The only thing was, we rode past red trees, and through piles of leaves blowing along the trail. We were lucky in that the weather was great! It was cold over night, but by the time we had bikes going on the trail it was a wonderful fall day.

I suppose talking about a beautiful ride, and the wonderful colors would be more interesting with a picture or two. The problem is all the bikes you saw in that picture were being operated by scouts… not to say they were getting into trouble, but I wanted to keep an eye on things.

That and the fact that all I had was my phone. It’s a workable camera, but phones aren’t suppose to go on camp outs. Adults get to bend those rules, but the boys complain to no end about their oppression when they see you get your phone out and they realize they can’t.

I left camp early because I was doing sound at church. It was probably a good thing I came home when I did though, because the smoke alarm at the top of our fancy vaulted ceiling had decided it had problems and started beeping earlier that day. Heather was about ready to loose it by the time I got there. It did provide an opportunity to use the big step ladder we bought shortly after taking possession of our new place… although I can think of scenarios were we would have used the ladder for some great purpose that don’t also involve Heather having dangerously high blood pressure… Maybe next time it will just be burned out light bulb.

Sunday we had a few friends over to carve pumpkins!

… yeah pumpkins… I didn’t really think it was time for those ether, but apparently it is.

My artistic vision was somewhat hampered by my absolute lack of manual dexterity or and artistic skill, so imagine the one I am holding looks sleepy. When you consider that the face on mine tilts down and sort of leans… and then add a little imagination it’s a pretty good pumpkin I think.

Oh, on a somewhat related note, I discovered that if you make pumpkin bread, but leave out the pumpkin, the resulting product will be a rather dry spice-bread. Stop by the break room at work tomorrow you might get to try some, its not bad… but it wasn’t quite what I had in mind.

-Jordan

The Slog

Posted on by Jordan

It’s that time of year again… Christmas is over and the weather just keeps getting colder. It makes it hard to want to do anything except crawl under a blanket on the couch and eat warm carbs.

This isn’t the first winter I have seen though. Heather and I are, distressingly, starting to establish a pattern to deal with this time of year. The initial plan had been to put our wedding anniversary provide some diversion in the midst of the post-Christmas blues. While that helps, we find ourselves feeling way too lethargic by about January 5th.

So for the third year running, we have embarked on a fitness challenge! I shouldn’t take too much credit, Heather is the driving force behind our decision every year… Something I am incredibly grateful for, considering I still lack the drive to start one of these despite the demonstrable benefits they have provided in my life.

That being said, going to the gym when there is an inch of slush in the parking lot and the air temperature is one degree is no fun at all. Also, it seems we aren’t the only people to have decided now is the perfect time to hit the gym, so it’s five times as crowded now as it was a month ago.

All the same, we are working out once again! I never expect the incredible soreness that comes with these things… I guess that means we are making progress 🙂

On the topic of being more healthy, I saw a recipe for pumpkin sloppy joes (aka Sloppy Jacks)

I won’t re-post it here, as you can head over to Cheap Healthy Good for the recipe

I knew I had to try it though, because as a rule Heather loves anything that involves pumpkin!

We didn’t have ground turkey on hand, so I just used beef. The results were… remarkably sloppy-joe-like. I suppose you would be able to see the difference if you had my filling next to a ‘normal’ batch, but I was surprised how unremarkable it was. It was also shocking to find that we couldn’t really taste the pumpkin in the sandwiches.

In keeping with the aforementioned rule, Heather loved them. I think we may have another quick meal on her list of favorites.

(no picture included, because they looked just like sloppy-joes)

-Jordan

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I are in the process of heading out to see family for the holiday, but I wanted to take a minute and put together a post.

We haven’t done all that much in the past week… oh yeah so I saw a recipe for Pumpkin Biscuits and found it really interesting. It was seasonally appropriate, and Heather tends to like anything with pumpkin in it.

The only problem is the quantities seemed overly large, and I didn’t want to experiment with such a huge batch.

My solution was to take the normal recipe I use for biscuits and add pumpkin to that. In the process, I thought it would be a good time to finally try making biscuits in the food processor. That may end up being the best discovery I made in this endeavor! Cutting in the shortening is always kind of a slow process, but with the food processor it’s done in about 30 seconds. I ended up being so fascinated by the success I was having I forgot to add the pumpkin until I already had the dough finished.

I don’t know when the ideal time to add the pumpkin would have been, but I guess adding it as the last ingredient worked ok. Well, I say ok, but this is when things started to go off the rails for the biscuits. I added 3/4ths of a cup of pumpkin to a recipe that only had two cups of flour. That was more pumpkin than I probably should have added. The results were a sticky mess. I could tell there was no way I was going to get them rolled out, the dough wasn’t thick enough to roll, even if it hadn’t been so sticky.

Initially I thought I could try adding some more flour, but then I worried that the biscuit-ness of the resulting paste might not be there anymore. Looking at what I had in the bowl a little more, I decided it was thick enough I could probably just scoop it onto the baking stone and see what happened.

The didn’t end up being the most attractive baked good ever, but Heather gave them high marks for taste! 🙂

-Jordan

Pumpkin Pancakes

Posted on by Jordan

This isn’t really the post I had planned for the weekend, but I managed to reproduce a good pumpkin pancake this morning, and wanted to document it. 🙂

Jordan’s Pumpkin Pancakes:

  • 1 cup of Hungry Jack Complete Wheat Blends pancake mix
  • 3/4 cup water ( just like the box calls for)
  • 1/2 cup pumpkin puree, thinned

Mix the pancake mix with water as directed on the box.

Mix canned pumpkin with water until the consistency is roughly the same as the pancake batter.

Add 1/2 cup of the pumpkin mix to the pancake batter. Cook like you would a normal pancake, being aware that the pumpkin holds a lot of water so they are going to cook slower.

That felt really over-dramatic for some reason. All the same, writing this down is important! Heather really likes pumpkin things, and I knew pumpkin pancakes are possible. The problem is that the canned pumpkin can hold a lot of water before thinning down. For no good reason I never actually looked up a recipe for this, and just kind of winged it. The first time I tried this, things went rather well. In the subsequent three or four times I was unable to get a good water / pumpkin balance. Too much pumpkin makes the pancakes act like sponges. You can get a nice crust on the outside, but they will be runny in the middle still.

I think the secret is to mix water into the pumpkin before you add it to the pancakes, meaning you don’t have to mess with adding water to the entire batter mix. The other key seems to be not adding too much of the pumpkin mix. I was disappointed that the pumpkin flavor wasn’t prominent in the pancakes. Adding more pumpkin means adding more water, and the end result isn’t very pancake like. I think perhaps adding some cinnamon and nutmeg, or “pumpkin pie spice” might bring out the pumpkin flavor more, but I think a half-cup is the limit for actual pumpkin.

Now I have to remember to check my blog before I try to make these again. 🙂

-Jordan