Roswell Adventures

Raise your hand if you understood my nod to the movie "Remo Williams...The Adventure Begins"! No, huh? OK, I guess it's just me. Anywho, while Matt was out we got our straw bales for this year's garden - 40 bales again this year! I will not ask for a show of hands regarding who thinks we may be a bit more than slightly insane. In preparation, we have been clearing out last year's bales. Much of the bales broke down during the gardening season - after all, that's what makes this work...you create your own soil as the bales break down. But there was lots left, and most of that has been relegated to one of two compost piles. We still have some to clear out, but we'll get there!  What is left from our main tomato bales. We'll plant tomatoes and basil here again this year - with marigolds in the side of the bales. These bales didn't break down nearly as much as some of the others. We may save out some of this straw for growing po...

Cold weather screams for soup...especially when you have had more than one day with temps staying stubbornly below freezing. Seriously - what part of "this is New Mexico" does Mother Nature not understand? This is what we woke up to Friday morning! The week before we had been preparing beds in the back yard so we could plant raspberries and blackberries, and thanks to the change in weather, I traded those visions of gardening for dreams of cooking up something to help us keep warm. Armed with leftover baked potatoes only slightly smaller than regulation footballs, I decided to tackle a soup I had been meaning to for quite some time - baked potato soup. I originally looked into all kinds of soups noting they were "loaded baked potato" variety of soups. Then I settled on a couple to merge and tweak and decided to launch my afternoon project. That we had diced, roasted green chiles in the fridge screamed out loud that I needed to include them in this r...

I have been wanting to make acorn squash stuffed with apples and Craisins, but I kept getting held up because I couldn't find a recipe I wanted. I will also admit that on these occasions I had not planned far enough ahead to allow myself some time to do research. I just wanted to magically land on the perfect recipe. Never happened. But what did magically happen is I finally started the process early enough to do some research and create my own recipe! And to keep life sane, I cooked it up in a slow cooker.  I think it turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself ;) Wash you squash (hey, it's fun to say!) and cut in half from stem to bottom - you'll want to use a heavy, sharp knife for that. Clean out the seeds and squash strings - you have to scrape pretty good to get them out. Lay a strip of foil in your slow cooker and set the acorn squash halves in. Isn't it cool how you can crumple up the foil to help the squash sit level. Peel, core...

After I moved to Roswell, Chuck and I started looking for things we could experience together. That first December we learned about Christmas on the Pecos in Carlsbad, NM and, after a bit of investigating, we learned that the weekend we planned to go coincided with a new event - the Carlsbad Winter Wine Festival. Thus was born a new almost-Christmas tradition that occurs on the first weekend in December. It starts at 3:30 on Friday, when we bug out of work just as quick as we can, drive home to change and load the car and head down the road to Carlsbad. Our first stop is the Trinity Hotel, where we check in for the night prior to driving over for Christmas on the Pecos...which will be explained in pictures shortly. After the adventure on the river we head back to the Trinity for a fabulous dinner. The Trinity is absolutely amazing - and not just because of the fabulous food. The building used to house the bank and the water office where Pat Garrett held office. It was on its way to...

Acorn squash is fairly new to us, but when a friend gave us one from his garden, we gave it a shot. It was delicious, but I didn't like how long it took to cook. For us to enjoy it during the week, I would have to come straight home and start to work on dinner...not one of my favorite ways to unwind from work. So, this delectable squash was relegated to weekend meals. Then I learned I could cook it in the slow cooker. I was totally sold!    A nice acorn squash, a little butter, a little brown sugar, and a little cinnamon, and this is what you get!     Doesn't this look delicious! Plus it gave me an opportunity to try some of my new cinnamon from Penzey's in Tucson :)   It went really well with the leftover ham, and since it is so easy - and since I can set it up in the morning and use a timer so it is ready at dinner time - this is going to be a regular at our dinner table. I made sure to save the seeds to plant in some of our dozens of bal...