Fall Baking (Cider Donuts and Pumpkin Pie)

Greetings, everyone!

It being the holidays, we've noticed a "rise" in our sadness to not be with family, but we tried to make up for it by doing some fall festivities. :)

One of the fall things we did was hang out with two members of Rodney's saxophone studio at our apartment, making cider donuts. :) Around here, cider donuts are a BIG fall tradition, one that I'd never known about living in Boise. We decided to buy some donut mix and hold a cider donut-making party. Since it was a Sunday night and we informed people a little too late about it, only two showed up. :) But it was still very fun, and they actually turned out much better than expected!

Here's some of the dough we started with: (notice the Blue Moon glass sitting on the cutting board-- that would be our roller, because we don't have one). :)

We also didn't have donut cutters, so you notice from the above picture that we used a biscuit cutter, and then to cut the middle hole out we just used a knife. Much easier said than done. :)

And THEN we had our first ever frying experience! :) Rodney and I have never fried anything before, so heating the oil and everything was a bit... scary, to say the least. Rodney was afraid of explosion. We were amazed at how hot the oil got! Needless to say, we put the donuts in. Here they are frying:

We burned the first batch, because the oil was much hotter than was necessary. We had trouble controlling hot oil temperature. :) But we eventually figured it out. Here's some of us trying to figure it all out: (note the device we are using... yes folks, that is a plastic spatula).

Of course, us being as excited as we were to try out this frying technique, we didn't realize how the extremely hot oil might have affected the spatula. Well, it did.

So the guys had this "brilliant?" plan to make cider donut pancakes. They call this their "million dollar idea." So, we thought it was absolutely hilarious when they whipped out the pancake batter to figure out the measurements / differences between the two batters (the paper on the fridge is the cider donut dough ingredients).

Although the pancakes didn't turn out perfectly, they still tasted pretty good. :)

CIDER DONUTS! :) (You can see up my nose!)

For Halloween, we spent the day watching scary movies, passing out Halloween candy to trick-or-treaters, and making pumpkin pie-- completely from scratch. Using an actual pumpkin, and homemade crust. :) It was fun! Waiting for trick-or-treaters was fun too, the neighborhood was really in a lot of festivities for Halloween. Even Ruby was excited! :)

We had only planned on very few trick-or-treaters, so only bought two bags of M&M's. We found out about 5 minutes into trick-or-treating, when we only had about three individually wrapped M&M bags left, that we would need to get more. We were thrilled to discover this.

Unfortunately when I got to Walmart to buy more candy, I realized that in my hurry to get out the door, I had only grabbed my keys and left my purse sitting at home. Of course it wasn't until after I had driven the car to the store when I realized this. So, I turned around and came back home. When I walked in, Rodney reported that he had to shut off the outdoor light because kids kept coming for treats and we didn't have any. :( So, I grabbed my purse and headed out again. Of course, because this kind of thing only happens to me, I realized I forgot my wallet in my purse, and of course I didn't realize it until I got to Walmart AGAIN. So, I had to turn around again to go home. By this time, I was so frustrated, and knew it was getting later and later and more kids were coming by our apartment, so I walked in the door and asked Rodney to run out because I couldn't handle any more bad luck! haha So he ran out to get candy, six bags in fact, and of course by the time he got home, we only had about 10 more trick-or-treaters all night. Perfect. :) So, we're going to pass out candy to our schools tomorrow and remember this for next year.

After all of this, we had dinner and started making our pumpkin pie. We, of course, recorded this for PROOF to everyone that we actually made it from scratch! :)

The pumpkin was insane to cut into. We desperately need a new set of cutlery anyway, and the fact that the outer shell of a pumpkin is crazy hard to cut into didn't help. I was the worried wife, standing by watching her husband try to saw through the pumpkin, afraid he'd slip and cut off a finger:

Our serrated knife did nothing, so although the bigger straight knife was more "slippery," it worked better.

Yay!! We finally got it cut in half. :)

We then had to scrape all of the stuff out of the pumpkin.

We wanted to roast pumpkin seeds later, so we separated the "gunk" from them.

We microwaved the pumpkin for 15 minutes and pulled the skin off the inside...

...and blended it. :)

Me rolling out the dough for the pie crust...

Pouring the pumpkin filling in (notice the incredibly awesome design on the border of the crust... totally my idea). :)

The disaster zone afterward...

Finished product!!! :)

We were very proud. :)

After we finished making the pumpkin pie and had set the finished product out to cool, we sat down to watch our second scary movie, Quarantine. Good movie, but unfortunately, it was in "Blair Witch Project" style in its shaking and constant swirling. It made both of us so motion sick that by the end of the movie, the pumpkin pie did not at all sound appealing. haha! So, we agreed we'd eat the pumpkin pie the next day so we could fully enjoy our success. :)

Great night! I hope everyone else had a wonderful Halloween too. :)

More Photoshop

Alright, so I had some fun doing some "morphing", so here's some kind of funny pictures I came up with:

Barack Obama and Rodney:

Conan O'Brien and Rodney:

Gollum and Angela:

Michael Jackson and Angela:

Mona Lisa and Angela:

Brad Pitt and Rodney:

Reese Witherspoon and Angela:

And now.... Rodney and Angela. :)

Noshember

So, today is Halloween! Happy Halloween everyone! Rodney and I will be having a relaxing Halloween at home, handing out candy and watching scary movies.

With Halloween then comes... November. This year, Rodney has decided to participate with some of the other saxophone players in "Noshember," or "No-Shave-November." Argh... I'm dreading it. I've never been a fan of facial hair on Rodney, and he usually grows quite a bit of facial hair after just a few days. We've decided it will be funny to take some "before/after" pictures, so we'll share them on here (...because it's such a joyous occasion.) December 1st, Rodney will shave off the beard, but keep the mustache. I guess that's part of Noshember. I'm already picturing what I think Rodney will look like. Here's my image of what I see as "before" and "after":

BEFORE:

AFTER:

I think that prediction will be pretty accurate. We'll see.

Swine Flu and 2 1/2 Hour Concert

Hello everyone!

This whole "Swine Flu" deal is crazy! The school absences are higher than I've ever seen before-- ever! The high school had 21% absent yesterday (which is extremely high, considering there are about 1,200 kids there), and the middle school had 22% absent. They're discussing whether or not they will close school for a day next week to give kids time to "heal" apart from each other. I've had to give about 5 passes a day to students who start to feel really sick to their stomach, and then I'm told they don't come back because they ended up having a fever. There are many kids walking the halls wearing surgeon's masks. They also have been "taught" well about the importance of hand sanitizer, because every room has that sanitizer smell from it being used so much. Scary stuff! Rodney is convinced this is how the world will eventually end... they try so hard to develop vaccines for things such as Swine Flu, and eventually a bad vaccine will get out and start infecting everyone... like an old-fashioned zombie movie. He's such a wonderful optimist.

Last night was a combined concert of the Symphony Band and the University Symphonic Winds at the Fine Arts Center.

Here's a view of the Fine Arts Center from the side (see the piano?):

From the back ^

And the front entrance. ^

Both groups performed full programs, with one intermission between them. It was.... long. I was really happy to see Rodney play, and the band really sounded great, but it definitely was.....long. I also was in a rush to get there from a drama with laundry (long story), but got there just before intermission.

I'm subbing today at the middle school for a science class-- they're watching Bill Nye the Science Guy! Remember that?? Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! It's great!

Pictures soon, once I get home. :]

Have a great weekend everyone! Miss you all!

Apartment Pictures

I realized that we haven't posted pictures of our new apartment on here! It's pretty nice-- the best part about it is the location, we live really close to downtown Amherst, and right off a bus route. We were then able to sell our other car before the move, so we pay less on insurance and gas. :) The management is amazing here-- you tell them a problem and they come fix it within the hour. It's really amazing. The place is pretty small, and we don't know how long we'll be here, so we haven't painted or really done much decorating, but here are some pictures!
Dining Room (with the back door)...

More dining room...

Kitchen

Pantry/Bathroom hallway looking into the living room

Downstairs 1/2 bathroom


Living Room


More living room...with our sweet cats to accompany :)

Front door-- staircase

Going up...

Upstairs bathroom-- not a good view, but oh well. :) It's also the "kitty room"... the litterbox is nicely fit behind the wall (you can BARELY see it), and food dishes set out.

Bedroom

More bedroom

So that's our apartment-- nothing special. :) At least now you can picture where we live! :)

Hope everyone had a great weekend!