And We Have Fire

The temps dropped from their ridiculously wonderful highs to seasonally appropriate November chill. We had snow this weekend and with the snow..... fire! After some pretty laborious work, Cam got the chimney liner installed and the wood burning insert all hooked up and ready to go. It was a great weekend for burning wood.

The insert is now "seasoned" which means that the paint has been heated to the appropriate temp several times in order to properly harden it for it's role of heat resistance. This thing puts out some serious heat! It's almost intolerable to be in the room unless you strip down to shorts and a tank top. We have a cold air return in the room but there is a chair in front of it. We thought that shouldn't matter much but it seems to be creating a problem for circulating the heat.

The fireplace is on the lower level of our house and we need to get the heat upstairs so we're trying to think of different ways to accomplish that and maintain the family room as a functional room and not the roasting room! we're considering one of those cute little mini ceiling fans at the top of the stairway to suck some of the hot air up but aren't sure we want to spend the cash on it. Something will need to be done if we're going to use this thing for supplemental heat this winter.

Random Fall Photos

Here's our guard dog Ihry. She's cute and has a snaggle tooth under bite. I believe she's half Pekinese and half miniature American Eskimo so we call her a Pekimo.
Cam still hasn't decided on a chainsaw and hasn't really had time to go out to cut wood anyway so we found a dude on www.craigslist.com to deliver some wood to us. I couldn't resist taking a photo of Cam's handy work building a wood rack out of stuff we had laying around.
The neighbors have this beautiful tree so I took a few photos of it with different settings on the camera, always fun to play with.

Pumpkin Season

Our family has a tradition of carving pumpkins with Nana and Papa the week before Halloween. My favorite part of this tradition is roasting the pumpkin seeds that I meticulously sort from the pumpkin guts as the rest of the family scrapes and clears the squashy innards. I like to add a bit of olive oil, a bit of real butter and a bit of seasoned salt. Delicious!

Here are the scary jack-o-lanterns we created. This first one is my random creation. I just wanted to do something different.
This one is by Papa. Adi thought it looked like a cat.
And Nana goes for the traditional style. Gotta have a simple traditional jack-o-lantern!

Fireplace Insert

In preparation for a cold winter we invested in a fireplace insert. Our existing fireplace was the kind that burned wood and didn't have a blower therefore rather than providing heat it sucked all the heat from our home and shot it out the chimney. Not very energy efficient. Last year we put an electric insert in the fireplace for my viewing pleasure, but after a 3 day power outage last winter we decided it was time to invest in something that will keep us warm whether we have electricity or not.
So here it is, in all it's glory. Except that it's not actually installed yet in this photo. We have a bit of work to do to make room for the chimney liner to get through the preexisting damper but hopefully we'll have this beauty up and running soon. I'm so excited for cozy evenings by the fire sipping on cocoa, or wine, or beer, or whatever strikes our fancy that night!

Big Berkey

After seeing a super cool water filter that our friends bought over the summer from www.jamesfilter.com we took the plunge and invested in a Berkey of our own.

The filtration technology used in this puppy is out of this world. It is used in 3rd world countries to filter nasty pathogen laden waters into pure drinking water! We could go down to the creek and gather water to filter through this thing if we wanted (or more likely needed) to. There is a travel size Berkey that is recommended for frequent travelers or camping. Seriously, you can use lake water or whatever in this thing and it will make it not only drinkable but probably safer than tap water!

We were using a Brita filter pitcher previously and this thing, no surprise, kicks Brita's butt. The model we purchased, the Big Berkey, has a 2.5 gallon storage tank on the bottom so as long as we remember to keep adding to the upper tank it's tough to run out of filtered water.

There is another model available which is made from plastic and the only downfall of buying the stainless steel model is that we can't see when we need to add more water without checking. I do prefer steel over plastic, however, so the benefit of superior quality far outweighs convenience and cost differential for us.

So if you are in the market for a new water filter, I highly recommend the Berkey. It is absolutely worth spending a little extra money up front considering the filters last two years as opposed to replacing Brita filters every two or three months... not to mention far better filtering technology and wide range of uses.

Keeping Up

It seems like once fall hits it's so hard to keep up with harvest time. I've frozen a gazillion beans and peppers, dehydrated some tomatoes, and my latest project has been peaches. We didn't grow them but they are local. We got many many pounds of peaches from Cam's Grandparents in Williamsburg, IA. The challenge has been figuring out what to do with them before the fruit flies (or gnats or whatever you call them) drive us crazy!!
So as you can see I've been doing some jam up - I found this great product called Ponoma's Universal Pectin that allows me to use only fruit because it doesn't rely on high sugar content for gelling. Instead, I used fruit juice concentrate (frozen) as the sweetener. That allowed me to play around a little bit with a few flavors. All have a peach base but the juices I used (from left to right) are: Raspberry Cocktail, Apple, and Grape. They're all tasty and I won't have to buy jam for a VERY long time.
Another thing I tried was peach granola. I have a wonderful raw granola recipe that uses mostly apples which I replaced with peaches this time and instead of pineapple I used a couple of apples and the result is a tasty, crunchy treat. I really love the way it turned out!!

I've also made some peach roll ups and plan to make even more. In addition, I'll juice some peaches and freeze the juice in Ball freezer jars. I'll probably dehydrate the pulp or use it in more granola. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Strawberry Popcorn

I harvested most of our Strawberry Popcorn and dried it in the dehydrator. Isn't it beautiful? We didn't grow much but it sure was fun harvesting what we did.

I've been eating a high raw (90-99%) diet for the last 43ish days now and aside from taking communion at church this has been my only exception. I only ate about 1/4 cup popped corn but it was delightful. I had no idea I would appreciate it so much. I'm glad I didn't eat any more than I did. I didn't really need to. It makes me think about those gigantor buckets of popcorn at the movie theaters packed overflowing with hot buttered popcorn. I used to eat and eat and eat at that crap. Gross. It's not good to eat just because something tastes good and it happens to be right in front of your face! Sheesh.

Anyway, the garden is a mess. I haven't done any weeding (though the weeds aren't really that bad). I like garden structures and things that keep plants from flailing across the ground or growing every which way (natural as it is). Next year we will have to be more mindful of supporting our plants and pairing crops more appropriately (the popcorn and tomatillos together was just a bad call). It's a learning experience. So blessed to have it in my back yard!