Golden Friday

Samantha: Mommy, will you play with me please?

June: I'm stronger than you mommy

A lot of our doggie friends have been tagged for "Opps, I ate it" award and barked about what they have eaten/stole and then consumed. We thought it would be fun to join them and tell you about our "Opps, I ate it" experience.

Samantha: Lets see, when I was a little pup I used to steal things and eat them but now that I am older and wiser, I don't do that anymore.

• I have chewed up the corner of mom's butcher block stand. That's for teaching her for locking me in the kitchen area. (YD here, when she was little we lived in a different apartment. The kitchen area is about 10' x 10' and it has a door. There was nothing in there that she could get into(or so we thought), that's why she was put in there when we went to work)

• Like mom said they thought there is nothing in the kitchen area that I could get into...WRONG. I managed to open one of the bottom cupboard and pull out a bag of confectionate sugar. I ate the whole bag and I also made a "snowy" scene in the kitchen for mom and dad. It was fun!

• Oh and here's a great one for ya! So far none of our doggie friends have done it(at least the ones we read). I ate daddy's money!!! How much, you asked? I ate 3 $100 bills!

• Receipts, mommy's books, chewed up my bed, chewed up stuffies(I still do that), mommy's bra, pens, cat poop and shoes.

June: When I came to live in my furever home I was quite nervous. So things that I have done then was not my fault, it was because I was nervous. Remember that, not my fault at all.

• This is my best one: I ate my pawrents' dinner! Raw steak and it was yummers! Daddy had to get the charcoal grill going, so he put the steak on top of the gas grill. I saw, I ate and I enjoyed! When he finally got the fire going, he found out that I already ate it!
• Daddy peeled some shrimp and left the shells in the sink so I stood on the counter and stole some shrimp shells.
• This next one is not a good one. I ate a block of rat poison 2 winters ago. It tasted good at the time but my poor mom...I will never ever do that to her again. (YD here: A few years ago we have really bad mice problems, so we put some rat poison in the garage which the dogs were never allowed to go in to. But when we got rid of the problems we didn't think of going in the garage and clean out the rat poison so some were still in there. One day 2 winters ago it was snowing out so I went in there to get my snowboots. I thought they waited in the hallway but June had followed me in the garage and saw the rat poison and ate it. When I came out the garage(only less than a minute) I saw her licking her mouth and my heart dropped. Ok now this may sound stupid right now but I actually asked June:"June, you didn't eat that, did you?". Well she did eat it. I took her to the vet right away. Those 2 months were the worst time in my life EVER! June did not show signs of being sick but her blood count was low and every other day I had to bring her to the vet for blood test and Vitamin K shot. I blamed myself for letting her suffer. I apologized to her that she had to go through this painful ordeal. Until this day, everytime I see something on the ground that has the same green color as the rat poison, I would panic. I certainly learned from this and I hope this will also serves as a reminder for any of you who use rat poison. If you do use it, please be sure to remove them when you don't have mice problem anymore. )
• I have also chew up the carpet but I stopped doing that a few weeks after I came to my furever home. See, I told you I was nervous.

So that concludes our "Opps, I ate it!" session. Hope you have a barkful weekend!

Garden Update

One word to describe this years garden: Dissapointing. :(

This year is not a good year at all for me. My tomatoes have all be ravaged by blight. I'm not the only one. This is the problem this year for most farmers in the northeast.
Fortunately, I still have something in the garden for me to harvest. We have decided that due to the blight problem we should pull our potatoes, that way we at least get the ones that are good. I planted about 2 pounds of potatoes(Yukon Gold and Dark Red Norland) and the picture below shows what I got from it. Not many but at least I got something.

The garlic I planted last Fall did great! I planted German Extra Hardy. They were pulled about 4 weeks ago. We have used a few heads already and they are delicious! Note to self: plant more garlic this Fall.


My cukes and zukes are doing good this year. I had initially started the seeds I purchased but those didn't grow, so I went to the local nursery and bought 1 plant each. These are the zukes and cukes I picked over the weekend. I have picked a few times before this and made an awesome Zucchini Apple Bread this past weekend. Don't worry, I will post the recipe sometime this week or next week.


Also from the garden: cabbages are looking good as well. I haven't harvest any of them yet but should be soon. My purple haze carrots are/were excellent! Sorry no pictures. I really should have taken some pictures of the carrots because they are really cool looking. The outer edge of the carrots are purple but the inside is orange! I gave some to my co-worker and her daughter's first reaction was:"Eeewww...I don't want those moldy carrots". A few days later, she asked her mom to ask me for more "moldy" carrots because they tasted really sweet!
I have also planted some cool weather veggies for the fall: radishes, fennels, napa cabbage and peas.

Since I have no tomato this year, I had to buy them. This weekend we went to a local farmer and bought 1 bushel(roughly 50lbs) of tomatoes for canning. We made mostly tomato sauce and some hot salsa. Out of the tomatoes we got, we made 5 jars (pint size) of salsa and 20 jars (quart size) of tomatoe sauce. I am heading to pick up some more tomatoes for sauce as soon as I finish posting this post.

And lastly, I will leave you with a picture of some sunflowers. Have a great day!

Golden Friday

This is a video of us playing tug-of-war. Guess who's the noisy one? Samantha!

June: Mom kept trying to get me to howl but I barked instead. Do you know why I was so excited? Mom said the B word - BONES!!!

Wordless Wednesday

Golden Friday

Happy Friday efurryone! It has been quite hot here but comparing to some of our furry friends who live in the southern region of the US or in Arizona, this is cool. If it's too hot out mom and dad don't like to let us stay outside too long. They said we(well more like Samantha) get hot spots easily. Most days when mom and dad get home from work, they like to hangout outside for a while and we get to do that too. Here are some pictures of us, just chillin' and watchin' the world.

June: Here's me, just chillin'. My favorite spot is actually underneath the camper.

June: This is how I look like when I saw another doggie walking by.

Samantha: Taking a break from chewing my stick to post for mommy.

Mom said we had a visitor in the back creek the other day. She didn't tell us at that time.

Mom took a picture of his heron right from the kitchen window.

2 Giveaways

Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Fellow Bloggers! My sister is celebrating the Grand Opening of her online homemade cards store and her scrapbooking anniversary, therefore she is hosting 2 Giveaways.


Y-Shong Homemade Craft is her new online store blog. Here's a sample of her own homemade card. Every card is unique and one of a kind. Once the card is sold, it's sold. She will not reproduce the same card unless it was requested by the card owner.

She will be giving away 2 cards(pictured above is one of them) from here. You can enter to win the 2 cards by simply leaving her a comment in the Suggestion Box.

Giveaway #2 is at her regular blog. To celebrate her scrapbooking anniversary, she will be giving away some scrapbooking materials. If you are into scrapbooking, please click on over to leave her a comment for a chance to win.

Go on, click over to her blogs. What are you still doing here? :)

Am I A Celebrity Now?

Last week when I posted my Double-berry Cheesecake recipe, I received a rather exciting comment:
"Hi there, I love your double berry cheesecake recipe! I represent cheesecake-recipes.org and we have selected this recipe to be in our Featured Cheesecake Section. Please email me so I can give you further details...Thanks and Keep On Cookin'..."

For real? My recipe was picked to be featured? That's so exciting! So I immidiately emailed April for more info. Long story short, my recipe is now featured on this site:
If you love cheesecakes, please check out this site for yummy recipes.

Last Friday was my stepson's 21th birthday! I made him a cake, eggless cake, because he is allergic to eggs. I found this recipe on eHow.com

Instead of using eggs, the recipe uses vinegar and I was a little worried about that. But after tasting the cake, I must say it's quite tasty, couldn't taste the vinegar at all.

Here's the recipe for this delicious Eggless Chocolate Cake:

Ingredients:

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup granulated sugar
3 Tbsp cocoa powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp vanilla
1 Tbsp white vinegar
6 Tbsp vegetable oil
1 cup water (I used 1/2 cup water and 1/2 cup milk)
1/2 tsp salt
Cocoa Frosting (See step 3)

Instructions:

1) Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease a 9" square pan with vegetable spray. (I used a 9" round and I greased and floured the pan)

2) Combine all dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. Then add vanilla, vinegar, oil and water. Hand mix well. Pour batter into the prepared pan and bake for 30 minutes. (I baked it for only 25 min and I thought the cake was a little on the dry side, so next time I would bake it for 20min and keep checking the toothpick every minute after that)
3) FROSTING:

1/2 cup margarine or butter

2 cup granulated sugar

3 Tbsp cocoa powder

1/2 cup milk

While the cake is baking, cream the margarine or butter, sugar and cocoa powder in a sauce pan. Add milk and bring to a rolling boil for one minute. Remove from heat and immediately beat the mixture, in the sauce pan, with an electric mixer until it begins to thicken to a yogurt-like consistency.

4) Once the cake is done, immediately pour the hot frosting over the hot cake. Let cool.

*Note: Instead of using the cocoa frosting, next time I would use Chocolate Ganache.