Thursday, September 11, 2014

Can You Guess This Riddle?



Can you guess this riddle? 
What do these 9 (plus 11 not-pictured) jars of pear sauce and your taste buds have in common?


    Answer: They were made for each other!!!!
    Aaron and I are making and selling homemade pear sauce.
"Pear sauce: it's like apple sauce, but with pears."
      Made with hand-picked pears and your favorite seasonal spices, each jar has been hand crafted with love and warmth straight from the heart.
We have two sizes:
13 oz. jars = $3 each
26 oz. jars = $5 each. 

If interested, feel free to call, text, email, or Facebook message one of us and we'll get you taken care of.
Ingredients: 
Hand-picked pears
Autumn spice blend (cinnamon, allspice, nutmeg)
*Special requests for spices can be made. 
*No added sugar (just what the pear already contained just by being awesome)

    We have had so much fun making this delicacy: though a long process, it's rather rewarding. A happy pear tree has stood proud and tall all by its lonesome near my mom's house for as long as I can remember living in Missouri. No doubt it's been there longer. Aaron and I picked pears last year, though for private enjoyment only since fruit was not as abundant. This year though, it went haywire and produced more pears than one could maintain sanity over! So, we neglected even an attempt at sanity in this harvest. What an adventure it was: We were both beamed in the head with multiple rogue pears, stabbed by twigs, and ambushed by territorial grasshoppers dwelling in the grass in the tree's shadow; however, the adventure not only proved fruitful (pun unashamedly intended), but the beginning of great discovery particularly for my handsome husband who saw for the first time in "the wild" an adorable little tree frog and walking stick, though mostly he remained occupied with the tree frog.
    We had a lovely past couple of days peeling and cooking pears like there's no tomorrow. We even have blisters and cuts to prove it, but regardless of injury to whatever degree, the labor resulted in our full tummies and excess to sell so that you too may enjoy the fullness of pear scrumptiousness.

Friday, September 5, 2014

A Cake Full of Blessings (simply because cake is tasty)

I recently summarized in a Facebook status update that some rather beautiful blessings have been bestowed upon us:

CAKE BATTER... About mid-summer, I received an electric bill in the mail (not an uncommon occurrence, as one can imagine), so eager to pay the thing off ASAP, I peeled the envelope open immediately, but was flabbergasted at how high it was: almost twice as much as usual. Seeing as it was the weekend, the company would be closed until Monday, and my impatient pay-it-off-now self decided to pay it. After all, there had in fact been a day when I forgot the oven an all. day. long. which in my mind could have very well shot the bill up. When I'd asked my husband about it, he didn't think it abnormal. He actually thought it more accurate since we had the AC on more than usual lately. So, I wrote the check, turned in the payment, and forgot about it.
The next month appeared seemingly out of nowhere and that cute little "Empire Electric" bill materialized itself into another tangible deadline in our mailbox. Opened that sucker up and guess what... NO BILL!!! It seemed that we were over-billed previously which completely paid off the next bill, plus a small part of this month's.

FROSTING....For quite sometime we've had a couple people offer on more than one occasion to sell a washer & dryer to us cheap. For some reason though, the opportunity to actually go through with such a transaction never arose. That some reason; however, would be this: Our neighbor in the apartment below/across from us informed us they'd be moving out soon and offered us their washer and dryer- for free (as long as we helped load up the moving truck, of course)! I believe anyone would see this as a more than fair deal, so of course, we accepted the offer. We already have the washer in our possession. It's fancy (in my mind anyway).

SPRINKLES... Ever since Aaron moved his things in at the end of last semester, one of the burners of the stove was rather awkwardly faulty. Anytime any other burner was turned on, but especially when the oven was put to use, this one little burner in the back right corner would heat up simultaneously (without deliberately being turned on) and often get hotter than it normally would on its highest setting! We ignored it for awhile, despite our poor teapot's tortured screams anytime we forgot to move it to another burner. Eventually we had the maintenance guy look at it, but of course, it wouldn't misbehave for him. The real breaking point to finally get it fixed though was one day while I was baking something in the oven, stove off, and the dumb thing melted 3 of my 4 stove covers, causing the apartment to smell like burning paint chemicals. What a headache. In response to our crisis, the maintenance man, who's been so patient and helpful with us, seeing as we seem to file a work order every other week, calmly assessed the situation, and decided (at no cost to us) that he'd completely replace the entire oven-stove unit.
It was like Christmas at 8 years old when he wheeled that beauty into our apartment. Shiny, right out of the box, all expensive looking. Oh, but don't worry; we broke that thing in real fast. Not so shiny now.

The Lord is our provider, even in (to some) the simplest ways. In my opinion though, those are pretty big deals.