Grandpa Jim's Garden: A Pleasant Weekend with Grand Children

Linda and I have had a very nice weekend hanging out with the Veatch children. Linda picked them up Friday evening so they could spend the night Friday night. I got up early on Saturday to drive Madelynn to Granite Falls High School so she could catch the bus to her cross country meet. After I got back home, I coached Natalie through making homemade biscuits. She did a pretty good job and should soon reach biscuit self-sufficiency.

Natalie cutting out biscuits

Natalie rolling out the biscuits

After breakfast, we went to Lakewood High School to watch part of the Hole in the Wall Cross Country Invitational. We specifically wanted to just watch Madelynn's race, scheduled to start at 11:40 am. We arrived ten minutes late, which was okay as Madelynn's race started 20 minutes late. It turned out to be a much bigger event than we had expected, with about sixty schools participating . That is an estimated 750 runners divided into ten separate races. This was the third year Madelynn has ran in this event. They have a shorter middle school race while the high school kids run 5,000 meters. While she didn't come close to winning her race, she made substantial improvement on her time with a personal best of 25:05. It rained cats and dogs throughout her race so she gets extra credit for grit. After the race, we took Madelynn back to her house while we took the rest of the Veatchlings back home with us.

Madelynn crosses the finish line

Linda has always had a strong liking for all baked goods made with pumpkin. That includes, pumpkin bread, pumpkin roll, pumpkin pie, pumpkin pancakes, and pumpkin waffles. I saw an interesting recipe on the Yummly website a few days ago that I thought she just might like. Pumpkin Snickerdoodles. Combining one of Linda's favorite cookies with pumpkin seemed like a surefire winner. This particular recipe came to Yummly from the Iheartnaptime blog. The blogger adapted it from a Martha Stewart snicker doodle recipe. She had simply added cooked pumpkin and traditional pumpkin pie spices to Martha's recipe. This seemed like a worthy use of the leftover baked Potimarron squash I had in the fridge so I mixed up a batch of the cookies in my tangerine colored kitchen aid mixer. The cookies turned out very well. They even met with Linda's approval and she maintains pretty high standards when it comes to cookies. The only unfortunate thing was that I had made three dozen wonderfully tasty cookies just before Fast Sunday. However, the cookies will still be there to enjoy on Sunday evening.

Unbaked pumpkin snickerdoodles

The finished product

Linda was a bit tired after watching Madelynn run three miles in the rain. While Linda took a nap to recuperate, I took the rest of the Veatchlings to see the new Peter Pan movie. The outing turned out well although Conner was pretty squirmy during the action parts. We returned home to one of the Veatchlings' favorite dinners, orange chicken.

A little follow-up to my previous post about the King Bolete Mushrooms we gathered last Monday. I sautéed some in butter which Linda had then used to make a very yummy beef stroganoff. I dried most of them in our little dehydrator which reduced them substantially in volume. Last night I ran the dried mushrooms through the blender which reduced four gallons of fresh mushrooms into four half pint jars. That wonderfully tasty powdered mushroom can be added to soups and sauces. The best pasta dish I have ever eaten was a fetuccini which had the powdered mushroom added to the pasta itself. It was absolutely heavenly.