Pepper Jelly

Last weekend I got a bit of a craving for pepper jelly with cream cheese and wheat thins.  I had everything at the house already, except for the pepper jelly.  I has plenty of peppers in my freezer though (remember the case I brought home from Lake Powell?  Yeah, there's still a lot of those.) so I did a search online to see what recipes I could come up with.

I finally settled on this one from Paula Deen. It seemed simple enough!  Since some of the chiles were hot, but most were mild, I decided to just use one cup green chiles in the recipe in stead of part green peppers and part jalepenos or serranos.  I made a double recipe (even though you aren't supposed to do that in canning).

I got everything ready to go, then realized that the family canner was at my sister-in-law's house still.  Luckily I remembered reading somewhere that you can make a water bath canner out of basically anything, so I cobbled one together with a stock pot, a strainer insert for a different pot, and some zip ties to hold them in place together.  I'm sorry I forgot to take a picture of that for you...  That canning method worked well, but only because I had two small batches.  It only held 4 pint jars at a time, so not exactly efficient for most things.

After all was said and done, I ended up with some great looking jars of pepper jelly, and will have some to enjoy for months to come.

Winter/January Decorations

I decided to break out the blues for a wintery feel this year.  I don't have a lot in these colors, but just enough to add a bit of interest.  I am loving all my colored paper lanterns.  It's so fun to be able to use any color of the rainbow!

December Book List & Yearly Totals

Doubleblind by Ann Aguirre - 302 pages
Side Jobs by Jim Butcher - 418 pages
Beauty and the Werewolf by Mercedes Lackey - 329 pages
Darkness Rising by Keri Arthur - 341 pages
Already Dead by Charlie Huston - 268 pages

TOTAL - 5 BOOKS - 1,658 PAGES


2011 TOTALS: 61 books - 22,044 pages

I've definitely slowed down a lot with my reading.  I keep getting distracted with other things like TV, movies,  comics, and video games.  Only so much free time to go around, and the books are piling up!

Christmas Decorations

I'm still loving the red and white outside lights.  We made a trek down to Modern Display in SLC to buy replacement bulbs.  We had tons of lights out and couldn't find replacements anywhere else.

I ordered more paper lanterns in a rainbow of colors so that I can have the colors I want for every holiday.

My mom and I made these ornaments the other night.  We were hoping to do more, but the cardstock I bought to use was too thick for most of the tutorials we tried.  These were the only ones that worked out.  They are pinned on my Christmas Pinterest board if you want to try them yourself.

Christmas Lights at Temple Square

Last Friday we spend the day in Park City with some friends.  While we were there, some other friends (who live in Orem) called and said they would be at temple square that night and asked if we would like to join them.  We jumped at the chance since we don't see them very often, and it was on our way home anyway.

The peachy-pink and yellowy-orange trees were my favorites.

The floating lights in the reflecting pool are also really pretty.

 All bundled up.  It was COLD outside! My poor toes were frozen.

The whole gang: Megan, Brent, Ashlee, Kristin, Travis, me, Pat, and four kiddos.

It was fun looking at the lights with the kids.  They get so much more excited about things.  I was actually quite disappointed with the lights themselves.  When I was a kid they were much better - more and bigger trees lit.  Temple square is also a lot smaller than I remember it being.