• Food

    Pickles and a Carrot Cake

    If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed by email! Thanks for visiting!Now that we are starting to harvest cucumbers we are turning to pickling them. I’ve made a recipe of my grandmother’s before, my mom’s mom, and I love it. Chris is branching out and trying some other recipes. The one in the photos below are a type of Claussen apparently. I didn’t take photos but I made two jars from a recipe of my other grandmother, my dad’s mom, that I found amidst fluttering sheets of paper tucked into an old, red Betty Crocker cookbook. Chris’ birthday was last week so I made…

  • Gardening

    Garden Update | Common Ground Community Garden

    A week or so ago we went home to gather the majority of the last items lingering at our parent’s houses. Chris and I popped in my mom and brother’s community garden to see how things were going and growing. This garden is very different from the one we are participating in at our new location mostly because there are actually full beds and members that are active in growing things. At the garden we are at, other than a school group we are the only private beds. Chris has been planting in the other empty beds in order to fill the garden up, harvest extra things and to share…

  • Creative,  Reading

    Adventure Reads

    These reads have been culminated throughout the years. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some that should be included. Send me your favorites that I should read! Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Most everyone is familiar with this book or at least the story behind it, the tragic 1996 climb of Mt. Everest in which 8 died and many more lost limbs and were injured. This was my first Jon Krakauer book and read it a lot of while doing a short backpacking trip in central Florida a few years ago. I think a lot of people, ok, a lot of outdoor people, have climbing Mt. Everest on their list of…

  • Food

    Eggplant Parmesan Sandwiches

    I can’t take credit for this recipe. Our field boss made these for us last spring at the Big Thicket project and ever since they have become a favorite. I didn’t grow up eating eggplant, in fact I only really ate it for the first time a few years ago. This is a very tasty dish, easy and for the most part healthy. Things you need: +Ciabatta buns or your favorite bread +Eggplant +Large slicing tomato +Good mozzarella, not the sliced kind. +Basil leaves +Olive Oil and spices to taste +Other condiments as necessary but it is not needed Slice, spice and grill the eggplant and tomatoes until tender. Apparently…

  • Family

    Scenes from a Monday

    Went to DFW on Sunday and Monday to finish getting the rest of our stuff and to see the family. Here’s a small snapshot.. Zoe showing off her purse sent from Elizabeth’s mom. Really excited about the animal inside the purse, too! Goofing off with my dad, PawPaw, during his lunch break. Grayson tucked away in his sleeper, cozied up in the blanket I made him. He smells so good! Pumpkin vines are taking over the side yard at my parent’s house! Grayson and my brother scoping the pumpkins out. Oh, we found a little pumpkin! He definitely didn’t like that and was swooped out quickly. There’s the real pumpkin!

  • Creative,  Photography,  Wildscape Photo

    Our Work in Print | Wildscape Photo

    We’ve been decorating our house with some of our work. It is nice to see our work off of the computer and on the wall! Not only that, but it reaffirms that we are doing something right! Chris ordered canvas prints from Pixel 2 Canvas because they had a discount sale on particular canvas sizes. He opted for a 40×60 print of this shot taken in Fakahatchee Strand. The flowers up close are clamshell orchids, Encyclia cochleata. I was hesitant about the shot on the computer but I really love it printed. You can almost feel like you are walking through the swamp! I went back and forth on what…

  • Gardening

    Harvest #1

    The garden is coming into full swing. Soon we will be harvesting daily or at least every other day and putting food away for the winter. I’m very excited about this! The golden zucchini was half this size on Saturday evening. We had about 20 minutes to run by our plot and water and check on things after four days doing field work and before heading to DFW for the weekend. We opted not to pick the squash because how could it have gotten much larger? Apparently it could have gotten much larger! It’s ginormous! I love the flower bud still attached to the cucumber in this photo. I tried…

  • Creative,  Reading

    Preoccupied

    With books. The Hunger Games trilogy to be exact. Over the last week that’s what I’ve been reading. Of course I could read them all at once but other things have gotten in the way. Work for example. Went back to the field for a few days to the Big Thicket in Beaumont, so paired with my reading I don’t have much time for blogging. I will need to take a break from reading to tackle some creative projects though. Julia Cameron in The Artists Way writes that reading is often a good excuse not to get things done. And she’s right. Reading, at least for me, is very consuming.…

  • Creative,  Crochet

    Leo the Model

    So I made these two baby hats for some coworkers out of scrap yarn I had in my stash. Always a good thing to find a way to use leftover yarn! Leo obliged me with some modeling… A nice profile view. Not sure about this mom! But really, I’m just a cute baby! Of course Leo and Samson are no strangers to modeling! Hehe!

  • Hiking,  Outdoors

    16 Miles Through Sam Houston

    Mentally I was prepared for a 10-12 mile hike. Because our maps were conflicting and not quite accurate we ended up on a 16 mile hike and I could feel it at the end. Hiking as much as we have hiked in the last year and a half it is easy to gauge how far we travel. Sometimes I think that since we are going on a day hike that I don’t need to prepare as if I’m thru-hiking. That’s a mistake! I learned when we hiked to the giant sycamore and wore cotton socks. This time I didn’t wear my hiking underwear…bad idea. Chafing! I wore the right socks…