A crown of Jewels: October 2010

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Father - daughter weekend

We had decided that when our three daughters turn 13, they will go on some sort of camping weekend with their Dad. They are still young enough to think this is cool and it would be fun to have special one-on-one time between a father and his daughter. Here are some photos from the 1st ever Father-Daughter weekend in our household. I am not posting any explanations, just will say that God blessed them richly and wonderfully with experiences that money can not buy and we are very thankful for this time of memory making.

ok , i lied...look behind her....isn't God amazing?!

Perogy Time!

Kate wanted homemade perogies for her birthday party celebration...so we got a rollin' and pinchin'!

Start with a good dough recipe. We looked at many and settled on this one.

I precooked all the potatoes and made my filling ahead of time. It should be cold so it doesn't start cooking the dough, etc. I also made cottage cheese filling with 1 tub dry cottage cheese, 1 tub wet 2 % cottage cheese, 2 scoops cooked potatoes, 3 egg yolks and 1 tsp salt. Worked well. Cottage cheese are the hardest to get to stick together and not pop when boiled. The best is using dry cottage cheese, but it is so expensive.

A bosch makes the dough work so easy peasy

Nana helps roll the first ones, being fancy with making them in actual circles. Roll thin or you'll end up with very chubby and tough perogies.

Let children make weird baby perogies and giggle giggle

Others take this job very seriously and perfect the art. Place a little ball of your filling inside the circle, fold over and start pinching. Various sounds are optional...like blup blup blup

Little pre-shaped balls of mashed potatoes, medium cheddar cheese and a little salt.

Making the little balls to fill the perogies

Boiling the first dozen, just to see if they are edible and stay together. Most recipes say to boil for 5-10 minutes. I ended up doing 7 minutes. We love them fried up the next day as well.

Yup, they are yummy and disappear too quickly!

Another option is to just cut the dough into squares. Then there is no waste and no "re-rolling" the dough as it can get tough. The other option is to use the left over scraps as noodles. yum.

If you do the square, they look square instead of the 1/2 circle.

We froze them on racks and sheets and then put them in freezer bags later.

YUM YUM!

My first teenager

Oh another season of life is upon us. How quickly it has arrived! Seems like yesterday we were bringing our sweet little blue eyed, curly lock girl home. Wondering how we were going to keep her alive (new parents) and how we could ever love someone soooo much as we did at that moment.

What happened between then and now?

All dolled up in my Christmas dress ~ some brown lipgloss and this is what happens!

Her sisters so giddy for her ~ they sure love eachother!

Ready for her lunch out with Nana

You can dress her up, but you can't take the cow out of the cowgirl!

Chinese food, yum yum

They got lots of looks, some doors opened for them and many "Happy Birthday's" from strangers. Asked Kate later what it felt like to be all dolled up pretty like...well, she could do without the nylons she said, but she felt very special.

I will post more on her weekend with her Daddy soon too.

Sunday, October 03, 2010

Walking in the beauty of fall

Sept. 19th dawned so beautifully warm and golden that we decided to take a little drive (look familar?) and enjoy some back woods exploring. We ate "Spitz" and walked and giggled and found treasures and took some impromptu pictures while trying to capture the splendor and sheer wonder of God's world as it turns to fall.

One day Mei saw one of these cute little things scampering across the yard and in her excitement all she could sputter was "look! A... a... a chip squirrel!"