Pumpkin Waffles with Apple Cider Syrup

Thanksgiving plans are all about the main event. 

Turkey. Check.

Ham. Check.

Mom's dressing. Check.

Crescent rolls. Check.

Homemade pies - pumpkin, pecan and coconut. Check, check, check.

These Pumpkin Waffles with Apple Cider Syrup add "special" to breakfast if you have guests coming for Thanksgiving.

On second thought, you don't need to wait for house guests, though you may need to make just half the recipe since it makes a lot. Or, you can make the entire recipe, cook up the extra batter and put the leftovers in the freezer for a quick breakfast treat that's way better than the typical waffles from the freezer case.

I made these waffles and syrup when Jill, Eric and Kinley were here earlier this month. It's our custom to have breakfast for our noon meal following church. Our kids got tired of it when they lived at home. Now, that's what they want. (I was like that about roast beef for our Sunday noon meal growing up. But, when I was at K-State, what did I miss about Sunday? Yep, the roast beef dinner.)

I actually grew up eating waffles for supper more often than breakfast. Morning, noon or night: Anytime is the right time for these. Even though the spices and pumpkin remind us of fall, buy a few extra cans of pumpkin on sale this week and keep this recipe (and other recipes featuring pumpkin) handy for special guests - or just because. And this homemade syrup is as tasty as it is easy. It is the perfect complement to the waffles - or for any pancake or waffle meal. Enjoy!

Pumpkin Waffles

with Apple Cider Syrup

Adapted from Kitchen Meets Girl blog

Waffles:
2 1/2 cups flour
4 tsp. baking powder
3 tsp. pumpkin pie spice
1/2 tsp. ground ginger
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 cup canned pumpkin
2 cups milk
4 eggs
1/4 cup butter, melted

Apple Cider Syrup:
1/2 cup sugar
1 tbsp. cornstarch
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1 cup apple cider
2 tbsp. butter

Preheat waffle iron. Combine the flour and ingredients through the brown sugar in a mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, stir together the pumpkin, milk and eggs. Add melted butter and stir.

Stir the flour mixture into the pumpkin mixture just until combined. Cook waffles according to manufacturer's directions. Serve with syrup.

Apple Cider Syrup:
Stir together the sugar, cornstarch and cinnamon in a saucepan. Add the apple cider. Cook over medium heat until the mixture starts to boil; boil until mixture thickens. Remove from heat and stir in 2 tablespoons butter.

Here's another recipe, Pumpkin Cranberry Bread, for the extra pumpkin that you hide in the pantry for later baking endeavors or for your Thanksgiving treat table. I just made it again to sell at the UMW Bazaar.

Or try Pumpkin Bread Pudding.

Bookends

I like to bracket my days with beauty on both ends.

From sunrise skies in the east ...

to sunset skies in the west.

Beauty is there - from morning to night and every time in between - 
 if we just open our eyes and take the time 

to look and find wonder in God's creation.


I saw this on a friend's Facebook page yesterday:
Sow a thought. Reap an attitude.
Sow an attitude. Reap an action.
Sow an action. Reap a habit.
Sow a habit. Reap a character.
Sow a character. Reap a destiny. 
If you can't see the bright side of your life or your day, 
polish the dull side. 

Counting my blessings and polishing the "dull side" 
here on the County Line today ...

 

Candy Corn M & M Cookies

Candy corn is one of those polarizing foods. You either really like candy corn. Or you don't.

But even if you don't like traditional candy corn, you will likely enjoy these Candy Corn M & M Macadamia Nut Cookies. I'd never tried the Candy Corn M & Ms until I saw the recipe and wanted to add them to my list of cookies to make for the United Methodist Bazaar earlier this month. I found them in the candy aisle at a discount store, but I'm guessing they will only be around until Thanksgiving since it seems to be a seasonal flavor and color.

The M & Ms have a white chocolate flavor. The orange, yellow and white candy coatings make these cookies a pretty addition to a snack table for any fall gathering from Halloween through Thanksgiving.

I hope you enjoy them - whether you like traditional candy corn or not!

Candy Corn M & M Macadamia Nut Cookies

Adapted from Something Swanky blog

1/2 cup shortening
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 cup macadamia nuts, roughly chopped
3/4 cup Candy Corn M & Ms
1/4 cup white chocolate chips

Cream together shortening and sugars until well blended. Add the egg and vanilla, mixing well. Mix together the dry ingredients. Add to creamed mixture. Mix until smooth dough forms. Using a wooden spoon, stir in nuts, M&Ms and white chocolate chips.

Use a cookie scoop to form cookies, placing on baking sheets that have been sprayed with non-stick spray. If you want to make sure some of the M & Ms show (for prettier cookies), save a few to place on top of the shaped cookies. Bake at 350 degrees for 8-10 minutes. Let cool briefly on cookie sheet before removing to rack to cool.

Note:

• I doubled this recipe. I always use the philosophy: Make the mess once and get double the production! (Just use the whole bag of the M&Ms. You don't have to measure. If you don't want to double the nuts, that's OK, too. You can just just use 1 1/2 cups and it will turn out fine.)
• You could also just add the Candy Corn M & Ms, macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips to a basic cookie dough. Many times, when I am baking cookies, I use this Back to Basics idea and get lots of different kinds of cookies with just one basic dough. 

Road to the Past

We are ready to do battle with mud or sand. The County Line now has its very own Army truck.

When I first heard it rumble into the farmyard, I grabbed my camera and found both Randy and Jake grinning from ear to ear. 

"Boys and their toys," I told them.

Randy bought the 1991 5-ton, 6-wheel drive Army truck from a local auto repair shop, which has bought and resold at least 10 of the trucks. Randy plans to add a feed box on the back of ours and will use it to feed cattle in the winter. Some of the other people who've purchased the trucks around here are using them to haul water and chemicals.

Back during the Korean Conflict, Randy's Dad drove an Army truck. We don't have photos of the trucks he operated, but I did find some photos online that might represent the vehicles he drove.

I wonder what Melvin would think of the latest addition to the vehicle fleet around here. I'm guessing he'd been grinning, too. Boys and their toys, you know.

I practically needed a boost to get up into the cab for my maiden voyage around the section.

 I felt like I was up among the tree branches as we motored down the road.

This shows the size of the truck, compared to our pickup.

Our diesel-powered Army truck has 16,000 miles on it. It has a heater, but no air conditioner. You can't have everything, I guess.

The operator can inflate or deflate tires from the cab. If you're starting to get stuck in the mud or sand, you can let out air to increase the surface area. If you get a hole in the tire, you can inflate it from the comfort of your truck cab.

Of course, it will have to rain for us to test out the maneuverability of this monster machine.

Randy had some help reading his new instruction manual. Kinley seemed pretty excited about the new addition to the farm fleet, too.

Kinley's Grandma is reserving judgment.

In Honor of Veterans

C. Melvin Fritzemeier, 10th Infantry Division, U.S. Army

My father-in-law, C. Melvin Fritzemeier, served in the U.S. Army following the Korean War. He didn't talk about his service with me. But on this Veteran's Day, I wanted to pay tribute to him and others who have faithfully served our country during wartime and times of peace.

Maybe I just needed to take him on a road trip by Fort Riley. As a kid, Randy remembers hearing "war stories" in the back seat as his Dad drove by the fort, where he had trained before being shipped out to Korea. 

C. Melvin Fritzemeier in uniform; upper right, Camp Casey, Korea, 11-Sept.-54, Saturday night was on the back of this photo; lower left photo was not captioned; lower right, caption says, "Ready to ship out to Korea from Fort Lewis, Washington."

Not long ago, I was digging for photos and came across several from Melvin's military service. After Randy's folks died, we cleaned out their farmhouse. By the end, we were all tired of sorting, so we ended up putting family photos in plastic tubs. We got elected to be the repository for all the tubs. 

Also in the box was this Indianhead insignia, the symbol for the Army's Second Division since October 1917 at Bourmont, Haute-Marne, France, from troops in World War II. The color markings (red, white, and blue) used to identify the division and their equipment in France were chosen  by the commander of the division as the colors for this insignia.  The star and Indian head signify the American origin of the division.

 Melvin was drafted three months after the Korean War officially ended. He served as a truck driver. Randy says he talked about sleeping outside in tents.


Melvin often told a story about Army food. He would never eat dried beef gravy after serving in the Army. He also never touched fruit cocktail. Randy says that he and a buddy each ate a gallon of fruit cocktail that they'd cooled in a nearby stream. He ate so much of it that he never wanted it again. 

As is the case today, servicemen and women leave behind their families as they go to serve their country. I found several little yellow books of photos, which Marie must have sent to Melvin overseas. Marie stayed with her mother in Stafford while Melvin served, and she worked at the Farmers National Bank until he returned and they moved to the farm.

Melvin served two years. By the time he returned to Stafford, he had traded his Private 2nd Class stripes for a Corporal designation.

On this Veterans' Day, I'd like to thank all the veterans for their service. Our little community of Stafford has a number of young men and women who serve in the Armed Forces. I thank them for keeping America strong, and I thank their families for the sacrifice of being apart from their loved ones, often in dangerous places. 

This nation will remain the land of the free 

only so long as it is the home of the brave.

  ~Elmer Davis

Happy Veterans' Day!

Same Song, Second Verse

The second year of drought has us singing the same song, second verse. As was the case last year, milo harvest 2012 was practically over before it started.

The "harvest" actually began in August, when the guys swathed, then baled half of the 125 acres we'd planted to milo this year.

This is one of the milo fields we swathed in August for cattle feed.

Our total acreage planted was down appreciably this year, from 270 acres last year. In 2010, we planted 290 acres of milo and had a good crop because we got timely rains. It's hard to believe, looking at my 2010 milo harvest post, that there was milo piled on the ground at the Stafford branch of the Kanza Co-op.

2010 - It's amazing what timely rains will do for crops! Click here for what I wrote about it.

The milo we double-cropped following wheat harvest 2012 was actually better than some of the earlier-planted milo. It's hard to evaluate exactly why that happened, except that the later-planted milo got a timely rain shower along the way. With the naked eye, it didn't look too bad.

This photo is kind of misleading. The field didn't look so bad from that perspective.

However, the milo that we cut with a combine instead of a swather made less than 10 bushels per acre. And if you add in the acres that were swathed to the grand total, the whole 2012 milo crop made less than 5 bushels to the acre.

Those figures don't get you nominated for Top Producer or anything - not that anyone in this part of the world had a bin buster either.

For the record, a good harvest would yield 55 bushels per acre. With a great harvest, we might take in 85 bushels to the acre.

As you can see in this photo, there were some heads with grain. But you can also see vast areas of the field with no plants at all, so no heads of grain either.

We plan to try dryland corn instead of milo next year. Today's corn has more drought tolerance built into the seeds than milo does. However, that technology makes the seed a lot more expensive than milo seed, too. So we'll see.

My optimist husband says, "Surely the drought won't last another year." Of course, he said that last year. But his optimism is one reason I love him!

The County Line: A Parts House

If this whole farming thing doesn't work out, I think I've found a new vocation for the County Line. I'm going into the storage and shipping business for GE dishwashers. I have already started my collection of inventory. I have three of the exact same part sitting on my porch (or, for the purposes of this blog photo, piled in front of my dishwasher).

I would be happy if I could get just one repairman to install just one of the parts.

This saga began more than a month ago, when I got a letter from GE. It read, in part:

In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, GE Appliances has announced a voluntary recall to repair certain Hotpoint and GE plastic tub dishwashers. ... This voluntary recall is due to an electrical failure in the dishwasher's heating element that can pose a fire hazard. GE has received 15 reports of dishwasher heating element failures, seven of which resulted in fire and smoke damage beyond the unit. Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled dishwashers and ... schedule a free repair or receive information about a rebate toward the purchase of a new dishwasher.

There's no date on the letter, but it had to have been the first week in October, since my first part was shipped October 4, and I called the hotline the day after I received the letter. I was assigned a repair appointment between noon and 5 PM on October 10. It was written in pen on my calendar. All was well. Or so I thought.

I then got a phone call from a furniture/appliance store in my region to set my appointment time for October 10. I thought that's what I'd done with my first phone call to GE. I don't know whether I scared them off by saying that they weren't going to find my house if they plugged the address into a GPS unit. I was just trying to be helpful and give directions that would get them here. I didn't figure they'd want to end up south of U.S. Highway 50 when they should be north of the highway. It has happened to assorted carriers, one of whom left Randy's new golf clubs at an abandoned house.

For now, I guess I won't give the business' name. But when they found out I didn't actually live in Stafford, they decided I lived too far for them to come to my house. And, admittedly, I do live closer to Hutchinson than their location. I do understand that the company only gets a certain amount for coming out and doing a repair. So that Kansas business called GE and said they didn't want to do it. The man from there called me back and told me that a Hutchinson company would do the repair, but he didn't know which appliance store it would be.

I think the arrival of the second part was the result of that call. It was sent FedEx Priority Overnight. If only the repairman had arrived in such a timely manner.

So I waited. When I didn't hear anything from anyone in Hutchinson or from GE for a couple of weeks, I called the GE hotline yet again. And I went through the entire encyclopedia of options, having to type in all my numbers and information yet again, no matter how many times I pressed "0" to get a real, live person. 

Eventually, they told me that A & E Factory Service would fix my dishwasher. I couldn't find that business in a Hutchinson phone book, so I asked where the repairman was based. She said she "didn't have that information."  She also assured me that no more parts would be sent since I had two already sitting on my porch.

Another part was shipped on October 23. It arrived shortly thereafter and has joined its two siblings on the porch. I figure the Fed Ex guy thinks I am a hoarder by now. And he's probably tired of delivering the same part to the same house. I know I'm tired of them taking up space on my back porch.

I had an appointment for Monday, but the most specific they could be, even last Friday, was that the repairman would arrive sometime between 8 and 5.  I was singing for a funeral, so I couldn't be here during that wide time frame. So I've rescheduled for this Friday. Let's just saying I'm not holding my breath, especially looking at online reviews for A & E.

I purposefully buy my appliances from a family business - not a big box store. I believe in paying a little extra to support small-town business and get quality customer service. Admittedly, it was not the business that GE wanted to send to repair the dishwasher.  I probably should have called my own dealer directly to see if they were among the businesses repairing the dishwashers.

Let's just say I won't be particularly anxious to purchase a GE dishwasher the next time around. Sorry I didn't make a long story short. I'm hoping for a happy ending.