Honeymoon

My wonderful husband planned our honeymoon as a wedding gift to me.  The trip?  A bike ride through Willamette Valley wine country, staying at adorable B&B's, tasting fabulous wine, & checking out the beautiful scenery.  We started out the trip by meeting up with Dan & Linds for a super fun night out on the town.  The next day, we packed it in & started our trip. A few pictures from the adventure:

Dinner at our first B&B

We were going to out to a restaurant, but our "mom" laid out a large tray of local cheeses, spreads, olives, & homemade bread with a bottle of local wine.  We made it dinner &  it was divine.

Loading up the bikes at Pedro's house

We're ready!

Hops!  There are fields & fields of hops.  Steve was salivating.

Does anyone know what this flower is?  We couldn't get over the blue color.  From far away, it honestly looked like a pond on someone's property.  The flowers didn't smell very nice, but they had the most beautiful color.  And the bees were going crazy.

Close up

At our second-to-last B&B (& my favorite), the husband & wife allowed us to borrow their car to drive into town for dinner.  This is us by the car - we were so incredibly grateful!  We were able to shower & dress up for a nice dinner & drinks in town.  No bikes for the night.  :)

We had a wonderful time & highly recommend Willamette Valley for their wine country.  Wonderful wineries & the people that run them, delicious wine, bounties of delectable restaurants, & the most charming B&B's.  We hope to go back someday!  (Although we'll probably take our car next time & use the bikes for day trips :))

What's this? A blog?

It's been awhile since posting...and for that, I apologize.  It's been a busy summer - to say the least.  Here's a quick recap:

We got married....

I love that our first dance picture so closely resembles our cake topper

We've continued to work on the yard...

This area of the yard does not grow grass very well (so abundantly obvious in this picture), so we're working on maintenance free landscaping (note the rock path, the mulch, & addition of native, drought-tolerant plants).  The V-section between the slate path & the sidewalk will probably slowly become grass-free.  Our plans include semi-permanent "hot boxes" (small moveable "greenhouses" that we'll make using old windows from the house) & continuing to add the maintenance free landscaping.  A work in progress...

We've continued raising our four chickens...

The coop (with hops sitting on top of the weather proofing tarp)

The girl(s) have made us proud & begun laying eggs...  

(At this point we don't know who is laying the eggs, but we're almost positive it's Fenway, the Plymouth Rock White.  The pattern tends to be one egg every other day, although we had two days in a row of eggs.  They're small, closer to the size of a medium egg in the store, but delicious!)

We've been canning...

Apple sauce (with apples from a wild apple tree on one of Steve's project sites) & strawberry apple sauce

Canned peaches & peach salsa (not pictured)...

And chokecherry jelly from the abundantly wild chokecherry bushes around town...

And of course, we've participated in numerous races, both around town & outside the area.  (Sadly, no pictures of those at the moment)

That's our life in a nutshell for the past few months.  Regular blog posting shall now resume!  :)

Engagement Pics

Aw, why so sad Steve?

The lovely & talented Lindsay was kind enough to oblige us in taking our engagement photos.  A sampling of her wonderful work...

Homemade Root Beer. Yum yum yum.

Along with plenty of homebrew beer, we're planning to have a non-alcoholic homebrew of sorts at the wedding: root beer!  We'd like to make sure to have a non-alcoholic drink for any of the kiddos, or those of us still kids at heart.  As what we've done recently with everything we're doing "DIY style," we decided to do a practice run of the root beer.  SUPER EASY.  Root beer does not have to ferment, so it was basically the process of mixing all ingredients in keg, connecting the CO2, allow to pressurize, & enjoy.

We decided to go with force carbonation (once liquid mixture is in the keg, using a CO2 tank hooked to the keg & force the CO2 into the liquid - wala! carbonation) - the other option is to carbonate using champagne yeast, which runs very two important risks: a slight amount of alcohol present in the liquid (um, this defeats our purpose for having root beer) & creating too much pressure in the bottles, leading to sticky messy exploding bottles.  No thanks.  We're planning to bottle the root beer for the wedding, so to ease the process of bottling already carbonated root beer from a keg (picture lots of foam spilling all over the place), Steve bought a handy dandy little object that we hook up to the keg which allows one to bottle the carbonated liquid without all the foam.  I don't know what the object looks like, the name of it, or how it works, but when we get to that process, I'll post pictures.  All I know is it allows you to bottle the bubbly stuff without filling the bottle entirely with foam.  Pretty cool.

Of course, after our trial run root beer was kegged, we decided to make root beer floats for dessert.  Oh my, so delicious.  The root beer is not the sugary sweet, watery stuff you get at the store.  It's sweet with a nice hint of spiciness & a yummy, creamy texture.  Real root beer.  :)

Cake taste testing? Why yes, I'd love to

My dear mom offered to make our wedding cake - we gladly accepted.  Not only will it save money (yeesh, it is RIDICULOUS how much places charge when "wedding" is in the description), but it will be so much more memorable knowing she made it.  Needless to say, my dad, Steve & I have been more than willing taste tasters. My mom has always been an excellent baker - she always made me the coolest birthday cakes growing up (including a 3-D doll cake).  She's in the process of practicing her recipes, as she wants to make sure it will be the.best.wedding.cake.  I have no doubts, but I understand the perfectionist attitude.  We've tried a few flavors, both of cake, filling, & frosting; as of now, we've narrowed it down but plan more taste-testing sessions.

This is a picture of our first taste-testing, when my parents visited us on their way to MT.  Wine, cake, frosting...I was one happy girl.  Our table was full & before long, so were our stomachs!  :)