An Abundance of Tomatoes

So many tomatoes! About 7 pounds of them.

When I got back from my extend travels through the Midwest the garden was a mess. Most of the plants were past their prime. There will be another post about the rejuvenation of the garden. There were several tomato plants that were in the last stages of life/the first stages of death so I picked the salvageable tomatoes from them and decided to try my luck at making tomato sauce. The hardest part of this whole process was preparing the tomatoes. First you have to wash them, then blanche them, then chill them, then peel them, then dice them. All of this I did with a huge cut on my thumb so it burned like nobodies business.

The washing.

The boiling.

The chilling.

More chilling.

I didn't take any pictures during the peeling or dicing stages as my hands were covered in tomato innards and there was no photo assistant (Catherine) to help me document the event. Then the easy part started...the making of the spaghetti sauce. I mostly based my sauce off a Cooks.com recipe but added a lot of other great things so here is a lot closer to the "recipe" that I used.

4 cloves garlic
2 lg. onion, chopped
4 tbsp. oil
6 lb. tomatoes
24 oz of tomato paste
2 tbsp. sugar
6ish tsp. instant beef bouillon granules
4 tsp. oregano
2ish tsp. salt
15 fresh basil leaves chopped
1/2 tsp. pepper
2-4ish tsp of Italian seasoning
1 small jar of fire roasted peppers chopped up (throw watery stuff from the jar in there too)
lots and lots of dashes of crushed red pepper flakes

Peel and mince garlic. In large saucepan cook garlic and diced onion in hot oil until tender. Put quartered tomatoes and juice into pot. Add all other ingredients. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, simmer on low for about 2 hours. I also harvested a lot of cherry and grape tomatoes from other plants and threw them in there whole. Enjoy!

Saucy and delicious!

So chunky and wonderful.

Smelling Is My Super Power

I am a super sniffer. I like to smell things. I like to smell everything, even things that smell disgusting. I like to smell my socks when I take them off, my scalp on the 2^nd no-shower-day, any type of food before I eat it, freezer burned ice-cubes, basically everything. At camp, I am the person who they call when there is a question between poop vs. chocolate, pee vs. water, or Cheez-it vs. Cheese Nip. The joke is that my olfactory sense are compensating for my hearing.

My favorite smells change, but today I am enamored with these:

-Water coming out of a hose

-Sunscreen on pool water skin

-Coffee beans in the Magic Bullet

-Nepthala soap scented clothes

-Fire roasted peppers

-Wet blacktop

-Overripe bananas

Geocaching in Wyboring

An intimidating team of serious geocachers

While I was in Wyboring visiting the family, my mom left my dad and I on our own. Both of us possess strong impulse control, ambitious drive to accomplish things, and an overwhelming responsibility to be mature….HA just kidding. We are both big kids who like to take naps and mess around with ideas and experiment that most adults would have little to no interest in. I always enjoy hanging out with the dad but this time was more fun than usual because we had some projects to work on...important stuff like walking with grandpa, trespassing to take pictures of the remains of a little town called Bosler, drinking Sonic vanilla diet cokes, watching YouTube videos of stuff blowing up, and finding geocaches.

If you live in America and don’t know what geocaching, you need to ask St. Google about that right now. Also if you don’t know what it is then you are probably not middle-aged, middle-incomed, and middle-of-the-countried. It’s very popular with the white, 40 something, in the Midwest. In a nutshell, it’s a treasure hunt using latitude and longitude coordinates and when you find the “cache” you write your name on a list and then log it on the computer. Super fun!

I knew that my mom and dad participated in this activity because they fit the demographic and apparently it’s popular with my mom’s group of friends. So as we were sitting with Grandpa at the botanical gardens I asked my dad about his recent success. My dad was explaining exactly how it worked and pulled out his GPS (cause that’s what everyone needs to bring with them on a walk). He entered the location of the swing in the rose garden and said, “I bet there’s one around here somewhere, probably right here where we are sitting”. We finished our walk and then went back to the house to nap (walking takes a lot out of ya).

Later on, we entered the swing’s location into the geocaching website and there were several caches within a mile…there was even one that said; “Location: Here”. THERE WAS ONE RIGHT WHERE WE HAD BEEN SITTING AND TALKING ABOUT IT! So of course we had to go on a treasure hunt for this cache immediately! We wrote down the location of a few others in the area and my nephew helped decode the clues.

We went back to the botanical gardens right at the swing and looked high and low. We found a baby bunny who was cute as the day is long. We found a lot of leaves that had fallen because of the hail. We found trash. We found a lot of stares from other people walking in the garden. We found a headache from ramming my head into a metal pole when I was crawling on the wall. Eventually we found the small cache in the crack between the retaining wall and the swing structure (SPOILER). We wrote our names, “The Salamander Duo” and the date. We then congratulated ourselves on our wit, our ingenuity, and our stick-with-it-ness. Quickly we jumped in the car and headed towards the next location. For the rest of the day we roved around the greater Cheyenne area looked for caches by statues, lakes, historical markers, antique fire trucks, and thickets of thistles. We had found 4/5, but had to give up by the lake because of lack of preparedness on our part. All in all a good day.

The dad with a cache...this one took a while

Our names on the log

More messing around in Wal-Mart

The code breaker for our team. Looking like he's ready for a safari.

Geocaching makes a person hungry. Taking a Dilly Bar break with the family.

Earwigs! My Arch Nemisis

The Casa Del Fuego has been under siege by the most distasteful insects in the entire world (after scorpions but tied with cockroaches and Missouri june bugs). For those of you who don’t know what an earwig is then you should say a thank you, kiss your mama, and pray that you never have to witness the horror that they are.

I’m not sure what is the worst thing about them; the sick way they wiggle when they move, how they just won’t die even after you crush them, the pincher butts-which really do hurt, or the urban myths that everyone has about a friend’s friend that got one lodged in their ear and then they had to go to the hospital and have it removed after it ate their brain and laid eggs in their nasal cavity. I think it’s clear by this point how I feel about them…obviously not a big fan.

I lived in distasteful ambivalence for most of my life. Until June 2011, the month in which they attacked the things that I hold dear. The earwigs invaded our pumpkin garden, which most of you know is something that I value above most things, and my bed which is just plain uncalled for and unnecessary. Catherine and I retaliated with a show of force.

My dad says, "Only boring people get bored". In retrospect, this is probably his way to get us to stop complaining about being bored but it's a mantra that I have lived by. I try to make most things that are dreary into a game or competition. Cathrine is a good sport and puts up with the endless games of "How Many Pomegranates Can We Dissect In A Given Time", "How Long Can We Wait Until We Do Dishes", and "I Bet I Can Do More 'Chubby Bunny' Marshmallows Than You". For this competition the rules were as follows: Each contestant gets 5 self-made traps of their choosing to use for 5 days, to be placed in locations around the pumpkin plants. The winner to be determined by daily body count. The winner gets a hand made certificate declaring them the Ultimate Earwig Killer and a McDonald's hot fudge sundae.

I did a significant amount of research and found that most forums suggest a combination of oil, fish oil, beer, soy sauce, corn syrup, and/or dish soap. I put a little bit of everything in mine in varying concoctions. Catherine decided to experiment with height and the difference between canola oil and extra virgin olive oil. We placed our cups and then waited. I ended up going to Arizona but Catherine carefully documented and counted the bodies. After the first night the death count was Adrielle- 32; Catherine-2. The big winner was the soap, oil, and high fructose corn syrup trifecta. What we really decided is that it came down to location. Because I get home earlier than Catherine I do the watering and so I had scoped out all the places that were being ravaged by the earwigs.

Catherine's Multi-height Hypothesis

Clearly scientific in our investigations (or killings)

Another view of mine.

Here were Catherine’s results after the first day.

1 - Canola oil and tuna (short): 0
2 - Canola oil and tuna (med): 0
3 - Canola oil and tuna (tall): 0
4 - EVOO and tuna (med): 1
5 - EVOO and tuna (short): 1

Mostly ants and one earwig.

And mine.

1 - EVOO, Soy Sauce, Tuna: 0
2 - EVOO, Soy Sauce, Corn Syrup: 1
3 - EVOO, Corn Syrup: 1
4 - EVOO, Beer: 9
5 - EVOO, Corn Syrup, dish soap: 22

Take that suckers. Basically that's what you get for eating my pumpkins.

After the first day, I went to Arizona and Catherine was in charge. When I returned we reset the traps and in total Catherine had killed around 30 and I had killed 92. Even though I won, the real losers were the earwigs.

August Update: I was out in the garden puttering. I tore out the sunflower and corn bed because they were done. As I was turning over the soil I found that they had come back with a vengeance. Since Catherine is gone I guess I will just kill them solo..less fun but hopefully it will save the new pumpkin that I just planted.

A Happy List for Camp 2011

A Happy List for Juliette Low Camp 2011

Happiness is:

-Mornings, afternoons, and evenings in the pool

-New Unit Counselors

-Pancake Buddies "I just love them so much"

-Using tongs in a variety of ways

-A talent show that didn’t suck

-Fitting 110 mini-marshmallows in my mouth during “Chubby Bunny”

-Trying new things

-Becoming a Widgey Woman of the Woods

-Playing “Never Have I Ever” endlessly

-2011: The Year of the Potato Products

-Learning new songs, singing new songs, killing new songs

-Closing campfire in the Dining Hall

-Kyle and Chris trying to learn the Edelweiss motions and failing

-Sno-cones

-The huge and various bugs

-The frog that went up into the urinal to escape Bamboo

-Chloe saying her nightly prayers and mentioning every person in camp

-Saying goodbye to my childhood and Harry Potter in the same movie

-Spending the morning swinging from the trees in our pajamas

-The Dirty Bucket Band

-Love cake

-Awkward conversations with ambulance drivers

-Sonic’s vanilla diet coke

-Sleeping in the Ad Building

-Heat lightening and watching it with friends

-The Bacon Fairy leaving wonderful presents

-Panera’s cinnamon rolls with butter

-Riding to the OP in the golf cart

-Making natural dyes

-Trying to use natural dyes

-Watching in horror as white pillow cases come out of the laundry…natural dye fail

-Cooking with charcoal that is not covered in lighter fluid

-The thrill of thunderstorms that you can feel shaking the walls

-Making laundry soap

-Trying to save a baby bird, even though there was little hope of survival

-Teaching snorkeling in the deep end of the pool

-Pickle Pops

-Katie’s dad and his love of Pickle Pops

-The Infinity Pool

-Bleaching the Unit shirts

-Meeting new campers like Beth, Ella, and Kim

-Parachute fun

-Stacy’s new found life as a gangster

-Allison singing “Dynamite”

-“Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle”

-The Fire Department coming to hose us down

-A fancy fan and cooling pad

-Dicecapades and Bang

-The Unit Party

-"Tell me your story, you inspire me"

-Annie and all of her exploits (especially ones involving the creepy Elmo hat)

-Maggie and the face paints

-Whipping hair back and forth

-Lola and Professor Cheesy the cabin mice

-Packages from far away friends

-The "classics" that make me miss camp for 11 months

The unit and their tongs

The natural dyes that seemed like a good idea at the time

Pancake buddies and a tired but happy me

Swinging under the Black Walnut Tree

110 mini-marshmallows...Impressive

Joy riding with Annie