More meatless Monday

Making homemade whole wheat tortillas.

A mixture of roasted ancho peppers (the last of them from the garden), garden onions, and mushrooms. These made great burritos. So flavorful we didn't miss the meat at all.

Sunday ended up being a meatless day as well although that wasn't the plan. We harvested the remaining carrots from the garden on Saturday afternoon and Hubby wanted to make a carrot soup. Here they straight from the garden.

And all clean!
The carrot soup was awesome. Hubby made it with our own potatoes and shallots from the farmer's market. Yummy! and I don't really like carrots all that much.

All alone

The loggers left this one and only tamarack tree standing. I was so afraid they would cut it down, but I guess they really did know what they were doing. It's the only one right by our house and I enjoy watching it turn color in the fall. I had a much nicer pic of this tree taken a few days ago with Cali posing in front, however due to a computer glitch all my pix from October were lost so this will have to do.

Cali's playmate

Klanncy has finally surpassed Cali in height and weight...by quite a bit. He's at least 30 pounds heavier than Cali. They still enjoy wrestling each other, but Cali is out-matched.

Pause for paws

I thought Cali's paws were big, but this bear paw print is HUGE!

Meatless Monday

We still have quite a few potatoes and onions in storage and since it was a meatless day today we decided a potato pancake for dinner would be perfect.

Here are the freshly scrubbed Yukon Gold potatoes rescued from their hiding place in the garage.

Yummy!

Don't try this at home...

Fortunately I was able to pick all the peppers from the garden before the big snow and deep freeze. Hubby suggested I dehydrate the Serrano peppers and then make pepper flakes.

Here are the dehydrated peppers still on the racks.

Into the Cuisinart for a quick blitz. I didn't have much material to work with after the dehydrating process.

Now comes the dumb part and not for the amateur, I lifted off the lid and fine HOT pepper powder filled the kitchen. Can anyone say "pepper spray"? Both Hubby and I were coughing, gagging and tearing up like crazy. This is definitely a task delegated to the outside with plenty of ventilation.

This is why we want to move...

This is my "pet" Stellar's jay. He visits every morning at 8. This picture was taken yesterday.

This picture was taken this morning after over 2 hours of snow removal. We had over 6 inches of wet, gloppy white stuff piled up everywhere. It's only the beginning of October. I can see having this kind of weather next month, but we have basically skipped right over fall and headed into winter. Now maybe all of the people who question our motives for moving will get it.

Final forest thinning

The loggers have been working for weeks now on the final thinning of the forest. They've cut a lot of small trees and are busy putting them in piles. They worked along our property line this week and cut most of what was a nice screen. Oh well. They weren't our trees anyway, but it was nice to have that barrier.

It's very easy to see the house from the forest trail after all their work.