Categories
Cooking

Fall Harvest Recipe #1

Sweet Meat Squash
Sweet Meat Squash

One of the things I like the most about the fall season is the produce coming out of the garden. The other day we stopped by a farmer’s market. We stocked up on some onions and spaghetti squash. While at the market, I also found a squash that I had never tried. It is a sweet meat squash. It looks like a medium sized bluish-green pumpkin. The flesh (once cooked) is smooth and creamy, without any stringy strands.

My first recipe is pretty straight forward. It is just diced sweet meat squash with garlic and onion.

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 Sweet Meat Squash cut into 3/4 inch cubes (about 6 cups)
  • 1 medium onion
  • 2 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 2 to 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • Salt & Pepper to taste (optional)

Directions:

  1. Cut sweet meat into cubes and place into bowl.
  2. Dice onion and add to sweet meat.
  3. Add garlic and mix together.
  4. Sprinkle with olive oil to lightly coat the vegetables.
  5. Place into 9×13 baking dish and cover with foil or parchment.
  6. Bake at 350 F for 45 minutes or until tender.

Serve hot with steamed rice.

Categories
Book Arts

Boxing Up Treasures

Last weekend my wife and I attended a class at the University of Utah’s Book Arts Studio on how to make presentation boxes.  It was a class called “Boxing It Up” by Chris McAfee. 

The goal of the class was to teach you how to make a presentation box, or a box to store a book or some other collectable.  We were suppose to bring an object that we would want to save/store/preserve.  Anyway, we missed that instruction.  When we arrived, we were shown the process of designing the box.  We were then told to measure our objects and plan our boxes.  Great!  I didn’t bring anything.  Good thing I always carry my Leatherman multi-purpose tool and Maglite.  These became my objects to build my box around.  You can find instructions on how to build a Clamshell Box from Cornell.

Some of the book cloth that we had to choose from didn’t move me at the time, so I selected the black.  Mistake!  The black is not forgiving at all on any glue goobers.  The black cloth can also take on a shine if you are not careful in working the folds with your bone folder.

This design uses quite a bit of book board.  The box is quite heavy.  Over all, I enjoyed the class.  I would have liked a little more discussion on the where’s, why’s and how’s of designing a box.  The class was a little too unstructured for my taste.

 
Presentation Box
Presentation Box
 
Opening the Box
Opening the Box
 
Fully Open
Fully Open
Categories
Gardening

Extreme Weather

 

Extreme Weather
Extreme Weather

Tuesday evening, June 2nd, we had a large thunderstorm roll through the area.  I thought that we were just in for a rain storm.  No!  It was a “pound your garden to pieces” storm with rain and hail.  The total precipitation from the storm was 1.63 inches of moisture.  In some parts of the valley there were home flooded.  We had so much hail that the down spouts from the roof looked like the ice dispenser at the 7-11.  The next day, some of the hail was still underneath the rain spout.

I have not checked the apples to see what kind of damage that they might have received.  They might be small enough that they have escaped, but I doubt it.

 

Ice Dispenser
Ice Dispenser