Snow Day in Wyoming

I'm in Wyoming, visiting the Motherdear. We got a lot of snow in the last two days, this is how it looked on the first day of snowing, and there is even more snow coming tomorrow.

It was a great time to work on making pies for Thanksgiving, an apple and a cherry lattice pie, aren't they pretty? The cherry filling is from a can, to make it easy, and I'm pretty impressed with the vents I cut in the top crust of the apple, usually they don't look as neat or as well-centered.

I made extra apple filling, but not enough for a whole pie, so I made a cute rustic tart sort of thing that I didn't get a picture of before we demolished it, but maybe in the next picture of the half that is left you can see how flaky and delicious the crust is and how melty the apples look. And of course, the remainder is going to be breakfast tomorrow. My favorite! And if you want to see the other projects that were good to work on for a snow day, go to www.flickr.com/sizzle04. 

Persimmons and Privacy

Last night I had this terrible dream that someone had found old information including pictures of myself and my husband from years ago from this blog and from blogs of old friends and they started writing their own little blog, dissecting our home life based on very little evidence, and they somehow hacked into my account to put up links to it from this blog to make sure that I and everyone I know saw it. It was very distressing, I had a hard time getting to sleep again. I decided to take it as a warning, and now I will be using nicknames for myself and my husband and anyone else I know to protect the privacy of everyone. From now on, my husband will be called Lovemuffin (heehee!) and I will be called Pricklypear and if you want your own nickname, let me know (privately, of course) and we will go from there.

Now that the official business is out the way, I have to tell you how excited I am for these crazy fruits! I knew they existed, I think my Grandma made a persimmon pudding one time, but until 3 days ago I had never eaten a fresh persimmon. They are super cheap at a produce stand in downtown PG, so I bought about 10 pounds, and I'm going to do some experimenting. I'm thinking I'll make a persimmon pudding on Sunday to feed some guests that we'll be having over, and today I'll try to make some jam. Why is there a banana in this picture? I'm trying to get them to ripen faster, to make sure that they'll have the correct amount of natural pectin. I have never seen persimmon jam, I'm not sure if it's possible, but I found a few recipes online that seem interesting. I will let you know how it turns out.