Chili Cook-Off and More!

I entered a chili cook off today. I entered it in the hot-n-spicy category first,but,they decided to move it into the vegetarian category. It was,after all, a no meat chili!! Well,I won. Whoo hoo!! I'm excited,and the kids are thrilled too!! What a fun thing to do.I have never really entered anything,ever,in my life! (I don't think I have)Well, that was fun....

A quick update....I got my cloth diapers this past Thursday (22nd).They have been a success so far.We all love them and they really are not hard to use at all. With our diaper sprayer attached to the toilet, cleaning poopy diapers has become a fought after job!! Matthea is always wanting to use the sprayer and hoping that a baby has a poopy diaper so that she can clean it! Funny.



Here are some of the garden goods that I canned.Boy,this had me tired by the time we were all done with it all.


The tomatoes kept coming in,day in and day out until we were left with just one small bowl.I even made barbecue sauce with our Large Cherry Red Tomatoes! That turned out really good.It was kind of by accident too. I sliced and de-seeded all of the cherry tomatoes and set them in a bowl in the refrigerator for a few days.I was just going to make tomato sauce out of them.So I went to cook them down on the stove and instead of being a bright red sauce, it took on the color of barbecue sauce...So, I took a quick break and looked up barbecue sauce recipes and quickly added the ingredients and presto(!) we had barbecue sauce, a sweet,onion sauce.mmm-mmm good.
The 41 1/2 pounds of apples that we had picked from our neighbors all went into jars as apple butter and apple pie filling. We actually have had a few tomatoes still coming in from the garden in spite of the chilling temps. The plants will be cut down in the next week and the garden will be shut down, for the most part,for winter.




The bread baking has now become part of our weekly chore.I am proud to say that I have not bought any store bought bread now ever since that first batch of goodness came out of my oven.I will say,however,that it is harder to keep around,because the kids just love it!!

Fall has come so quickly.Where on earth did summer go? Where did this year go? It seems like only yesterday that we were anticipating Charlotte's birth and now she's here and the summer's over,the crisp air has replaced the hot and dry air and before you know it we will be done with Thanksgiving and celebrating Christ's birth and anticipating another new year!!!! Wow!

We bought pumpkins for the children the other day and for the first time in years,we actually let them carve out their pumpkins.Probably not something that we will continue to do, in order not to be partaking in Halloween with the pagans, or to portray that we are.But, I think that carving pumpkins or other types of gourds/squashes is a fun activity.You can get pretty creative without having scary,ghoulish faces on your pumpkins.These are their pumpkins...(from left to right) Sebastian's, Matthea's and Jade's...

We even roasted all of their seeds too, with a cinnamon,sugar and pumpkin spice seasoning added to them.Deeeee-lish!!!!


That's it for now. God Bless my family and all of you out there! Have a happy Autumn.