October 2009

A productive weekend seeing as the weather was nasty and we didn’t work outside like planned.  I am half way done with quilting the last row of blocks for Dear Jane – my “Insanity“!! It really and truly is coming to an end.  Here are the blocks I  worked on yesterday.

Row M blocks 3 & 4

Row M Blocks 5 & 6

Row M Block 7

I am going to try to get more work done on this quilt later today.  I have quite a few errands to run today though and I am trying to daily go to the fitness center (Monday – Friday) and work my way back up to an hour work out.  I kind of let it slack for awhile.  Then I got use to physical activity when we were travel because we would take 2 or 3 walks a day and sometimes they were long walks.  At my daughters house for the week I was there I was walking a lot and climbing stairs as she has a two story house and a finished basement.  Lot’s of stairs which I am not use to.  The neighborhood was so nice for walking also.

Here I do not walk in the neighborhood – we live in the country and the road barely has any shoulder to speak of to walk on and we have some traffic of forestry trucks and other large vehicles go by.  We also have quite a few stray dogs which aren’t always very nice – not as many strays as there use to be but still enough that I do not like walking out here.

I have continued on with the knitting of my scarf although like I say I am just using the knit stitch instead of the pattern that I had intended to make.  Here is what it looks like so far:

the yarn is pure merino wool and it says kettle dyed.

Yesterday I caved in and did some baking.  It was chilly outside, drab and cloudy the day just called out to me to do some baking.  I made a large batch of pumpkin bread mix.  I made two loaves and a dozen large muffins.  Here is the recipe.  I like to use as many whole grains as possible without having too heavy of a loaf.  This recipe can be made with just white flour if you prefer.

Pumpkin bread with pecans. Pumpkin muffins with pecans and raisins

Pumpkin Bread

2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 large eggs
1 – 15oz can pure pumpkin (no spice added)
3 1/2 cups flour ( I used 1 cup of oat flour, 1 1/2 cups of graham wheat flour, and 1 cup of white flour)
1/4 cup of ground flax seed (you may leave this out of you don’t have it)
2 teaspoons of baking soda
2 teaspoons of salt
1 teaspoon of cinnamon
1 teaspoon of allspice
1 teaspoon of nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon of cloves
2/3 cup of water (if you use the grains that I do I normally add just a little more water – maybe a 1/4cup)
1 cup chopped pecans
1/2 cup raisins to half of the batter

I do not do anything fancy with mixing.  I normally just place the oil, eggs, pumpkin & sugar in the mixing bowl and whip until blended.  Then I add the dry ingredients in any order I feel like.  Pour in the water and blend until everything is mixed.

I poured mix into two loaf pans 2/3′s full.  Then with the remaining batter I added the raisins and stirred.  I made a dozen large muffins out of that portion.

Bake on 350, the loaves for about 75 minutes – check after an hour.  The muffins are large and I baked them for 25 minutes checking after 20 minutes to see how they were coming along.

I like to wrap the loaves and freeze – you may keep them frozen for up to 3 months (they won’t last us that long!) The muffins I also freeze and take one out as I want it for a quick breakfast or snack and pop in the microwave to warm up.

(I doubled the recipe to have enough to make the muffins also)

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