Tuesday, June 22, 2010

From Field to Can!

On Saturday we went and picked a huge bucket of fresh strawberries. I found on one of my favorite blogs an easy recipe for strawberry jam and thought I would try my hand at it. We kept a few around to eat on ice cream, shortcake, and right out of the bowl! Fresh strawberries don't last long around this house though so I had to make the jam quick!

Here is a very small portion of what we picked all clean and cut:


It took me for-EVER to mash up all of the strawberries. I meant to buy a potato masher at the store but got all the way home before I realized I forgot it. That would have made this whole process a lot easier! I didn't even take a picture of the huge amount of sugar that I had to add because I don't think anybody would eat it. Here are all the strawberries, sugar, and surjell mixed together and ready to be canned!


These three are all ready for the fourth of July! Those lucky enough to join the Iron Gate celebration just might get one of these!


These two are my favorites! I know that it's just strawberry jam (and super easy to make) but I still had to make it look adorable!


This is how much two batches makes. It's all a frozen now but should be more than enough to last us for the whole year and lots to give away!


I followed the directions from Sarah at the Thrifty Decor Chick but it also follows very closely to the directions on the surjell box.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

June 13th

Two years, two great things to celebrate, two days filled with bad luck!!

Our wedding day was beautiful! I have wonderful memories that fill that day. All of our favorite family and friends were there and we really had a great day. But it rained on our outdoor reception...

And our caterer (don't even get me started on her) brought the wrong size table clothes. On top of that she didn't even seem to care and my mom was the one running around to find something, anything to cover the wooden tables. She found these blues ones at the hotel next door and I am grateful but look at them! The blue didn't quite fit with the rest of my soft green and pink decor. Every time I see pictures of these I cringe! (Thankfully because it rained nobody sat at these tables for very long)


One year later and it's our one year anniversary. We decided that instead of doing gifts we wanted to take a mini-vacation to celebrate together. We want to wait though until I am off for the summer so that it can be a three or four day vacation. So our actual anniversary day was spent going to church, cleaning, laundry, Andy smelling up my house with beer brewing and was supposed to end in a nice dinner. This is us right before we left the house for dinner....
Let me rephrase that, this is us right before Andy locked us out of our house without any keys to get back in or start up a car. This is my very unhappy face :(
To make things worse while he was using my phone to look up a locksmith it died. He didn't have his on him. No better time than this to meet our new neighbors! While we were waiting for his Dad to send a locksmith Andy decided to try his own hand at breaking into our garage door. He was successful!! I am freaking out! If Andy can break into our house that means that anyone can! Needless to say we are making sure that our garage to house door is always locked now and the deadbolt lock is always locked! We finally made it out to dinner that night. This picture is before all of that bad luck struck.


When we got home we tried our year old cake top! The white cake part wasn't bad but the frosting and filling were nasty! It made a long trip from Medford to Salem when it got the most beaten up, then moved from apartment to house and has been squashed in the back of our freezer for awhile so it's not aesthetically pleasing either! We both took a bite and then threw it away :)


At dinner that night the waiter gave us this free cupcake because it was our anniversary so we ate it instead! It was delicious!

Needless to say, so far we have not had the best of luck on June 13th. Fortunately we did have a great honeymoon so hopefully the next few weeks will bring some better luck!