Havin' fun with my friend Tikvah

Me and Tikvah riding double on her horse Denny - that was a lot of fun :)

Shearing the Llama and Ram

The other day my grandparents had the shearer out to take the hot fleece off their camels (grandma calls her llamas and sheep her camels - I know it may seem a little weird but my grandma is cute).  He actually came out just to do the ram (Spike), but he figured he might as well do the llama (Piquito) while he was there.  Spike did fine but Piquito did not like it at all!  The shearer had to lean into him while he cut the fleece off so that Piquito had to use all his feet to balance so he couldn't kick the poor guy.  Because let me tell you what, he was sure trying :)

How embarrassing!

Piquito was interested at first

I can't even tell where his head is in this picture! :)

All done and getting drug back to the pasture - he is doing the splits!

Now Piquito's turn!

Not sure if all llamas can do this - but Piquito can kick in any direction 360 degrees!

Wow - look at all that hair!

He was so skinny afterwards and he looked so embarrassed, too!

Cherry and Huckleberry Pies!

We made two pies out of some of the cherries and berries we have been picking lately.  We made one cherry and one huckleberry / cherry.  This recipe is for canned cherries - you have to do something different with fresh cherries and we learned that the hard way :)  The pies taste great but they didn't thicken so all the filling came out when we cut them.  But this works great with canned berries.

 This recipe makes 2 pies
The Crust:

 1 cup butter
1/2 cup coconut oil
4 cups flour
2 teaspoons salt
10 - 12 tablespoons ice water

Let the butter and coconut oil melt and then mix them up (we were lazy this time and made the crust in the food processor)

Butter an oil

Then put the flour and salt in

You want really freezing cold ice water - like as cold as you can get it

Mix up the butter, coconut oil, flour and salt

Then add 10 - 12 tablespoons of the ice water, mixing in between each one, just a bit.  You really don't want to over mix at this stage.

It should look like this when you are done

Set the dough aside and now for the filling:

5 cups canned cherries

3 3/4 cups sugar

3/4 cup flour

1 1/2 cup huckleberries (optional - we only did it on one of our pies) - you will only do 3/4 cups per pie

some sprinkles of Almond extract

Here are the pie sized bags we froze the cherries in

Put them in a bowl

And add the sugar and flour

Then the sprinkles of almond extract

Yummo!  Can you smell that?!?!

 Then we are going to come back to the crust:

Mom put her apron on for this part - because you always get flour on your clothes :)

Put flour on the cutting board

Then you divide your dough into 4 sections - one piece should look like this

Then roll it out to the right size for your pie pan

Then sort of roll it over the rolling pin like this to put in on your pie pan

Then fill it in with your filling

Fill it up to where it is level with the edge of the pie pan

Then roll out the top crust and put it on top

Making scallops on the edges

Then you cut these 4 little pieces out so that it can ventilate and not pop :0

Bake at 425 degrees for 35 to 45 minutes

All baked

 That looks SO tasty!  I have to go eat some now :)  Have a great time making this yummy pie!

Picking and pitting cherries

Yesterday we went cherry picking at someone's house.  That tree was packed with em'!  You would pick a bunch and think that was all - then you would see another branch that had about 100 cherries on it!  You didn't really have to move around at all the whole time (even though we did to make it not so boring).

Then last night we had to pit them all so we could get grandma's pitter back by 9 in the morning :)  These little tart cherries didn't really work that well in the pitter.  It was easier to do them by hand - so Mom used the pitter and I just pulled the pits out by the stem.  It was kind of tedious and we finished by midnight - so I was really tired this morning - didn't want to get out of my warm bed :)  But we have 9 pies worth of pitted cherries!!! :)  Yummo!