Farm Girl Friday -26 October 2012

A couple Farm Girl adventures to share this week.  I had a couple more but the littlest Farm Girl accidentally erased my camera last night.  We had a fabulous home school Halloween party on Wednesday.  Being an 'over-achiever' I volunteered to make 'really difficult' homemade caramel apples.

I actually read the recipe wrong the first time and cooked the caramel up to 284F instead of 248F.  Oops.

Bulk Barn had lots of Halloween coloured sprinkles so we bought some for dipping.  My sticks should have been longer.  I burnt my thumb on the very first apple, so after that the apples just got dipped, not covered.

My friend's son has PKU and cannot have protein or risks brain damage, so I also whipped up some candy apples.

I'm so glad I made these.  These are the Halloween apples from my childhood.  They are so yummy.  We lived in my great-grandma's house, which was around the corner from my grandma and grandpa's house.  One of their neighbour's, Mrs. Brown, made dozens of these candy apples every year for Halloween.  But you had to make sure to get there early.  My Mom and her siblings always made sure to hit Mrs. Brown's first on Halloween too.

Ella and Daddy took advantage of the lovely weather the other day and dug up her potatoes.  Boy, plants sure know the difference between rain and water.  This is Ella's harvest this year:

I've used the 3 biggest ones already (forgot to take a picture first).  A really sad harvest for 5 lbs of seed.  But given the year I'm surprised we have any potatoes.  Our Mennonite friends, who grow acres of potatoes and usually have them available all year, figure they will be out of potatoes by December.  Not good because theirs are the potatoes I like to buy.

We grew a new kind of potato this  year, the German Butterball.  I will definitely be growing these again.  They are such a beautiful yellow flesh.  I've never seen a potato like it!  Now I just have to remember where I ordered them from, hopefully I have it written down in Colin's garden notes.