Field Roast Grain Meat

I've been a vegetarian for about 12 years now. Wow, that's a long time. Anyway, a friend and fellow veggie recently told us about Field Roast Grain Meat. Now that it is available at our local Co-op we decided to give it a try. Here is what the Smoked Apple Sage sausage looked like when we diagonally sliced and pan fried it in our beloved cast iron skillet:
I then added it to some penne pasta (Adi wanted semolina instead of whole wheat this time. I try to use ww but sometimes I have to please my princess). Some gardeners blend veggies, Earth Balance Buttery Spread and Herbamare finished off this super simple and VERY satisfying vegan meal.
Then Cam made this awesome black eyed pea and "sausage" stew. Wow, it was soooo good! It's nice to have a tofu alternative .Field Roast Grain Meat gets two thumbs up x 3 from the Driscoll household. Yum!

Brewing Beer?

So this activity didn't actually happen in the Driscoll home, it was a fun thing for Cam to participate in during our Thanksgiving trip out to Oregon where my brother Shane and his family live. Here's a photo of the beautiful nugget hops used for brewing. I don't know much about the hops but they smelled sweet and delicious and I learned that they grow well in Zone 5 which might be a fun experiment next year.

This is what Shane's garage brewing station looks like.
Hops are a cookin'
There are a lot of benefits to brewing your own beer: reducing waste by recycling bottles is just one of them. Here, Cam gladly shows off the beer tree where the pressure washed bottles are waiting to be refilled with a batch that Shane started previous to our arrival.
Finally, Cam had a lot of fun bottling the batch that was ready. I think he really enjoyed the whole process and realized how easy it really is. This could become a new homestead hobby, especially if we can grow the ingredients that go into it. Hmmmmm...

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.