Chalk Drawings, Harvesting and Homemade Pie Filling

It has been a long, crazy, stressful last month here. We've had injury, illness, our computer decided to die... so thankful we had GeekSquad Black Tie Protection on it because the motherboard was done for. So it got sent off to be fixed and we are making due with our not so smart phones and our crippled laptop. Both are desperately in need of replacing. Also, in the middle of it all, I had my grandmother come stay with us for 4 days and then at the beginning of this week D had a work function over in Cedar Rapids, so Evie and I tagged along and went to my parents while he was "working". Then, just to make sure we weren't bored we decided to rearrange our basement living room/computer/sewing/workout space.

Now, on to the good stuff!

Chalk drawing with Evie turned into Evie telling me what to draw and picking out the colors. And its probably just me, but I love this "family portrait"

Then, the artist in me clawed its way out and I spent a good portion of the time doing this and it turned out pretty good. Then, it rained later that day. Boooo!

Homemade pie filling, cherry on the left and rhubarb(from my patch) on the right. Basic recipe would be about 2 1/2 c of rhubarb or 1 sm bag of frozen pie cherries (about 2-3 cups I think), mix together 1 cup sugar with 5 tablespoons of flour then mix into fruit and cook on low heat with lid on stirring often to keep sugar from burning until liquid from fruit mixes with sugar/flour and thickens... its not an exact science :)

lavendar from my herb garden

trial run of hand pies made from uncooked tortillas

almost forgot to take a picture before they were gone! it turned out okay with the tortilla, i think it was just so flat pressed that it didn't have any of the normal flakiness of regular pie crust even though it was basically the same ingredients. they were still yummy though :)

my rhubarb is getting to the end of the season so it is drier and a lot less sweet (even for rhubarb) but it still is yummy with the right amount of sugar ;) and I don't want to waste it so I have started slowly harvesting it, cleaning, cutting and freezing it

To make it easier to use out of the freezer, I lay the pieces out on foil on a cookie sheet in the freezer till frozen and then put in freezer bags.