A great weekend!

We finally feel like the wedding is pretty much behind us, so we are starting to get back to our normal ways, without any of the guilt we felt the last few months whenever we did anything not directly related to the wedding. It feels wonderful!!!

Friday brought our friend Tristan, who lives in Connecticut but came home for a great deal of the summer. He came over for the evening and we feasted on fresh corn from the Phinney Farmers Market, coho salmon, porkchops with mushroom sauce, and a wonderful salad with mixings from the market and our garden! Yay! The boys played Wii til the wee hours while I crashed out on the couch. Long week of staying up for the Olympics finally got to me!

Saturday morning I made us another feast of skillet potatoes that turned into a really killer scramble! After that, we felt it would be prudent if we got a little exercise, so we walked down to the Ballard Locks, which is a little over 2 miles from our house. We had a great time check out the ENORMOUS King salmon, and saw the biggest sea lion I have ever seen in my life!

My two boys!

Tristan dreams and drools about landing something this big!

I have never seen salmon this big!

The sea lion had to be at least 8 feet long! We feared for the salmon, yet yearned for a Nature moment before our very eyes...

Tristan headed out to pick up his lovely girlfriend from the airport, and Kevin and I decided it was time to do something with the apples on our apple tree. Now this tree gets completely laden with apples every year, but we have never done anything with them. The first year we lived here, I think we thought the tree was on our neighbors side, and last year we'd planned to use them for cider pressing at the Shaffer's, but got to them after our landlords had their way with them. This year, we wouldn't be had again!

We went through some trial and error. At first we just picked 10 or so apples, and made a small batch using our small ricer. We just quartered the apples, threw them in a pot with an inch of water, and let them boil till they were soft. Then we pressed them through the ricer, and got a gorgeous colored applesauce. But the peels were kind of annoying because they clogged up the ricer pretty quickly. So we tried a second small batch where we peeled the apples before boiling them, and while they went through the ricer a little better, peeling them was tedious. We decided it was time for a trip to Bed Bath and Beyond to purchase a food mill. We used a gift card from our wedding, so thanks to everyone who got us one of those! :)

After that, it was easy going! We did about 4 huge pots of apples, and they went like butter through the food mill. We ended up with about 10 quarts of applesauce, most of which we have frozen, one quart was given to the upstairs neighbors since half the apples are theirs anyway, and a couple quarts are quickly being consumed by us out of the fridge. I like mine with a little nutmeg and cinnamon, Kevin likes it straight up, unadulterated! Yum Yum! Homemade applesauce!

Pick apples

Wash apples

Peel apples when using a ricer

Aren't they pretty apples?!

Boil apples til they are mushy

Squeeze apples through food mill (actually a ricer here, but we learned quickly that the food mill is the way to go!)

The prettiest applesauce I ever saw!

And it tastes great, too! We didn't add anything to them, just yummy yummy apples!

Here's the bigger batch, Kevin knows how to fully utilize his cooking pots!

Here I work away with my new love, the food mill!

I especially like the handy feet, that fold in for storage! Yay!

Get in my belly!

Taking up our whole fridge! Good thing we didn't have any food when we started this.

All ready to go in the freezer. All told about 10 quarts. Not bad for a days work!

Today we had another great day. We decided while the sun was still out this morning to walk down to Green Lake and rent a paddle boat. I had never been on one, and had always thought they looked like great fun! So we got out on the water, and paddled around for half an hour or so, and then the rain clouds came barreling down on us! We got completely drenched, and totally loved it! It was a good hard rain, and we kept finding little "coves" to go in to get out of the rain, then heading back out. It was great fun! Didn't even feel bad that we didn't get to go swimming, since I was drenched head to toe anyway!

This afternoon, we headed out to the Ballard Farmer's Market for more goodies. This weekend, we have gotten lettuce, peaches, apples, kohlrabi, tomatoes, potatoes, red and yellow onions, corn, green and yellow summer squash, and broccoli! What a haul! We will be eating well all week!