Well, we've been home exactly one week from our big Canada and New England vacation.
We got in a visit with Steve's dad at hospice and also Steve got his hair cut after cancelling his appointment while we were on the road. We are getting settled back in and doing all the things that we've wanted to catch up around the house. Our neighbors kept very good care of our house and took care of lawn cutting and harvesting tomatoes. The grandkids came over and watered flowers and plants. We had plenty of rain so the rain barrels took care of all of our needs without having to turn on city water in the house.
Like I said in my last blog, we turn off the water at the main valve while we are gone. Our daughter once had a mishap with a bad fitting on a dishwasher that flooded their entire first floor and almost ruined all of their hardwood! It's a vintage schoolhouse so the insurance company opted to pull up all the original hardwood floors, have it all re-kiln dried, and laid them all back down again. Then they were all sanded and stained and polyurethane sealed. The insurance company said it was cheaper to do that than to actually put down new flooring! Can you imagine? So after that experience, we always make sure we turn off our water when we leave for any length of time. We have vintage hardwood floors that I would hate to see damaged.
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We learned a few things on our trip. Especially after using our new to us Winnebago View for an extended period. We love the ease and maneuverability of it. We love how everything has a place, and we have already taken out some things we are not using. We love the features and the storage and everything works quite well.
But.... I have never really cared for convection ovens. So much so, that in our last motor home we actually removed two of the lower cabinet drawers and installed a larger RV stove with a propane oven. That made me very happy.
In this motorhome, we could do that, but it's going to sacrifice a lot of our very valuable drawer space.
During our trip, one morning I baked muffins in the convection oven. It's so high up over my head it's not even at eye level for me. It's pretty dangerous for me to pull things out of the oven while reaching up over this little flimsy rotating rack that you need to use when you're in convection mode. I actually burned my knuckle a little bit, dropped the whole pan of muffins upside down onto the counter below, which broke into a million pieces and made a huge mess!
The other disadvantage of the convection oven is that you need to have a power source to make it operate. So unless we are camped somewhere with a power hookup to electricity in a campground, the only other way it can be used is if we are running the generator. I don't think anybody wants to hear us fire up a generator at 7:00 in the morning in the rustic wooded campground to bake muffins? This was one of our main reasons why we had converted the stove and oven in our last motorhome.
So Steve and I decided that to bake regular items or prepare baked dinner meals when we are traveling, we would like a propane oven. We just had to figure out what we were going to do.
Many many years ago I had a little portable Coleman propane oven. It was called the Coleman Instastart oven. I called it my Easy Bake Oven. It was so cute and we used it an awful lot. We sold it long ago when we upgraded to the inside stove/oven combo. Wish we never sold it.... We went online and saw that they are not made anymore. We thought maybe we could search for a used one on eBay. We started reading some reviews, and instead came up with an idea.
This Camp Chef stove and oven is highly recommended by a lot of people on the RVing lists. Even people with van conversions or little pod trailers with outdoor kitchens. We started reading the reviews and they were really good.
We looked online and they run in the $200 to $250 range. Ouch!!
We watched some YouTube videos about it, and read more reviews. Then we saw someone had them on sale at Costco for about $150. None of the local Costco's in our area had them, nor do we even have a Costco membership.
Back to the drawing board.
So then Steve searched on Facebook Marketplace. Here was a lady within 25 miles of our house, who sells new-in-the-box packaged merchandise that she buys by the pallet full from somewhere. She has a rented warehouse and regular hours every week to come in and buy items. And sure enough, she had one of these Camp Chef stoves new in the box for only $90!
We contacted her and told her to hold it until we could get there. She agreed and we got there before she closed at 4:00 p.m. The box did have a puncture hole which is why it was probably sold on a pallet auction. But it was still sealed from the factory and unopened. She let us open it up and everything was intact and complete. There was one tiny little ding on the lower edge of the oven. Cosmetic only and didn't bother the function. Steve looked closer and figured he could even pop it right back out. Sold!
We brought it home and put it all together. Yes, Steve was later able to take the ding out of the bottom edge just like he figured. You just got to love that guy hey?
On top are two 8,000 BTU burners that we can cook outside or perk coffee or even pop popcorn if we want. This will be nice if it's too hot to cook inside of the camper, we could be out here making breakfast on the stove top and make toast inside the oven portion. The lid lifts up with side wings for a windscreen, and folds down for storage. It has piezo ignition, no matches needed. It can run off the 1 pound green cylinders or our 5 pound or a 20 pound grill tank via a hose.
The oven itself is very generous. The inside measurements are 15 in wide by 11 in deep. It can hold a 9x11 pan easily with space all the way around. It comes with two baking racks and three different positions. It came with one of these nice baking pans but I had another one from Tfal that I added to the repertoire. Also my larger muffin pans from the house will fit in here, which are better than the small ones that I used to try to use in the convection oven.
I added a 9" pizza stone from Meijer store to the bottom burner cover (not in this pic) which helps even out the heat distribution when baking. Long time RV oven baking trick!
We started it up and burned off any new manufacturing smells. We also put in a small oven thermometer because the one that is built in is sometimes inaccurate. So now we can tell what the actual temperature is inside the oven and adjust accordingly.
The overall size of the unit is 25 in long by 15 in deep by 18 inches high. If fits absolutely perfectly in the bottom of our closet underneath our clothes, so it has a nice secure spot to ride along with us.
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Speaking of cooking and baking, during our search for YouTubes on this particular propane oven, we found this other YouTube on baking cinnamon rolls. It's just a random You Tube, not specifically for this oven. They can be baked in any oven. He shows how to take a tube of refrigerator cinnamon rolls and doctor them up before baking into the most amazing tasting cinnamon rolls! You'll have to watch the video to find out what the guy does. But we did it this morning and they are absolutely delicious. Steve said that we are never going to do them the old original way again.
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Before we left on vacation, we had promised all of the grandchildren that we would come back in time before school starts to take them miniature golfing. And that is just what we did! We are missing Clayton, because he decided to spend the week at his other grandfather's house. But we will take him another time all by himself. So we had four of them to take for a day of adventure.
Here is a little YouTube that I shot of the fun we had over at the mini golf here in Oconto, some are slide show shots and some video segments interspersed as well.
We also decided to tie dye t-shirts
like we did last year
right before school started
They needed to lay the pre-washed t-shirt flat on the floor. Then take a dinner fork and stick it in the middle and rotate. It helps to have a second set of hands to help group it together and keep it level. It gets rolled up, just like a cinnamon roll!
Once it's rolled up into a flat spiral, then rubber bands are stretched around it at various intervals to hold it tight and to create marks where the dye will not absorb as easily.
The kids put on old t-shirts as smocks and we covered our plastic tables for the project. The kids put on rubber gloves to protect themselves. I had picked up a tie dye kit and Chelsea had one to bring over too. They've done this already, so they knew what to do again!
Even 15-year-old Jameson got into the act and he really worked hard to customize his black and red and white dyed shirt. He said those are his favorite colors.
Here are the bundled up t-shirts in their rubber banded cinnamon roll configuration. Whitney and Claire did every color under the sun. Chelsea chose to do blue green and yellow. And Jameson's of course was black and red. I did a white sweatshirt in only blue.
We let the dye soak in while we were gone miniature golfing... It sure was a lot of fun. Grandpa is the one that knocked his ball into the water hazard three times! The kids thought it was hilarious having to scoop it out with the little dipper nets for him.
They really had a lot of fun playing all 18 holes. Claire developed a method that she called "Drag and Drop". She would just corral the ball in the curved edge of her putter and drag it right the hole and let it drop in. That's okay, whatever works.
Jameson and Grandpa both tied scores of 60 from 18 holes. They had a lot of fun and it was worth the ride in the convertible as a reward on the way back home. Chelsea and I drove separately in the Saturn. There just weren't enough seats for all six of us in that little convertible.
We came back home to a pizza party! We cooked up some nice big pizzas and the kids got to eat as much as they wanted with beverages of their choice. Sometimes you just got to spoil them!
Now back to our tie-dye T-shirt progress.... We carefully snipped all the rubber bands to see the creations that they made. What beautiful designs!
The shirts still need to "rest" like this for about 6 to 8 hours before I rinse them and wash them and dry them. So after I finished them by next day, I delivered them to the kids to wear in time for the weekend.
Kids were having fun playing at Grandma and Grandpa's house. Did you know we happen to have two doctors in the family? They even have office hours at their hospital when they are open and closed. That's good to know.
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Another thing I had to catch up on since we got home are my tomatoes. They are producing by leaps and bounds from just four regular plants and one Juliet grape tomato plant. We brought some to Steve's dad to snack on. He loves tomatoes.
I picked a big basket full and judged it was probably another four quart jars worth. I like to do all of my processing in my big kitchen sink and tried to keep the mess all in one spot.
I really miss my Mom when I do canning. Coming from a big family with a large garden, we always had to pitch in and help with the canning during August and September. We had an abundance of vegetables, plus apples for making sauce... then my parents would do two huge crocks of sauerkraut. The stinky crocks would be percolating for a month before it was ready to get canned up.
Mom and I would carry all of the jars down to the basement. There we lined up rows and rows, shelf after shelf. Literally hundreds of jars. We depended on it all winter long. When we would put the last jar in the shelf, my Mom would stand back with her hands on her hips and say "My oh my, are we ever rich!".
I sure miss her.
With her in mind, I took care of slurping my skins off my tomatoes and processing my jars with a smile on my face --- as I thought of how many years I stood by her side, doing the very same thing.
Soon I had four jars done and in and out of the canning kettle. PING PING PING which is music to a canner's ears. I have been doing a few jars every few days to keep up with the plants.
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Oh, one more thing we learned when we were traveling is that I really really miss my Microsoft Streets and Trips Program on the laptop along with the GPS dongle. Although Microsoft no longer supports it, it still allows me to do map updates and the program still works on my older laptop. So for our next trip I am taking it along. Now, in our last motorhome I had a nice pull-out laptop desk built in to the front dash on the passenger side. Not so on this Winnebago View.
But we started researching what other people have done to take along a laptop or even a tablet that is accessible from up in the front seat. We found that there is already a very firm frame underneath the passenger seat and already has an accessible hole on one corner that will be perfect for mounting in this articulating arm.. I can swivel it around and it has three different articulation points plus a tilt to get it and a comfortable position in front of me in the passenger seat. It can swing out of the way when not needed and it can even flip up flat if we want it totally out of the way. The laptop can be secured with velcro straps right to the laptop tray. We think this might be the answer to being able to have the Streets and Trips functioning when we travel.
The little GPS on my phone from Google Maps or the one built into the motorhome dash from Rand McNally just do not let you zoom in and out easily to get big pictures of what you're looking for or where you're headed. Also, you have to go to alternate screens or search boxes to find points of interest or gas stations or campgrounds. I don't find them very "user friendly" and it can make my whole route vanish with one backward touch. Ugh!
On my Streets and Trips I can plan the route ahead, and look behind, and I can keep exact locations of everywhere we've been. I can save maps and routes and alter them easily. I can add detailed push pins of where we stayed, what site was the best and what we paid. I have maps like this from all of our trips in the past --- ever since we started traveling with a laptop. So I am quite excited to be able to use it again. So much so that I even went in and graphed out our entire last trip just to keep it in our records, even though we didn't have the laptop with us.
What is really nice is that the Streets and Trips will leave a little blue mouse trail of everywhere you've been, right down to where you've turned around or where you've parked at a wayside and had a little lunch or even where you stayed within a campground or even to know where the dump station was. Things like that are important to me to keep track of and I am looking forward to having the Streets and Trips with us again for our next journey.
So that's it for now...
but we are planning our next camping trip
after the crazy holiday weekend is OVER
and the horrible awful temps forecast in the mid 90's are past.
My last few blog posts have been about projects around the house. Well, here's a post with stuff that Steve has been working on out in his garage.
The garage has four stalls, it's two stalls wide by two stalls deep with another garage door out of the back. Steve decided that he would start insulating the entire ceiling and then the walls. Once he got the insulation up in the ceiling, now he started hanging sheets of drywall.
With the gracious use of our helpful neighbor's drywall lift, it can easily be done by one person lifting up those huge 4 ft wide by 10 ft long sheets! I think they weigh over 75 lbs each, so the lift is extremely helpful.
In typical Steveio fashion, he had the ceiling completely covered in drywall within a matter of days. We did have to make an extra run to haul another batch of sheets so he would have enough. Our little trailer can only haul about 10 sheets at a time. I helped load up the sheets from the lumber yard at Menards, but our wonderful neighbor Ed, came and helped Steve unload them all once we reached the garage.
This will really keep the garage warmer in the winter, but Steve plans to only heat it if he's working on something out there. It also makes the garage lighter and brighter by having the reflective quality of the unfinished drywall as opposed to the wooden rafters.
Steve bought these really cool LED light socket adapters that you can change one single light fixture into five by using low voltage drawing LED spotlight bulbs. It really helps illuminate the entire garage.
PS, see how we hang our canoe? We pull it up on a couple pulleys to suspend it near the ceiling. They are pulley kits from Harbor Freight for hanging deer at hunting season. They came with all the hardware and ropes for only $14 each. Pretty handy. All of our life jackets and paddles and seat cushions Etc are all stowed away inside of the canoe. Less clutter in the garage.
Once he had the ceiling all done, then it's time to start the walls. This is something that I could be more helpful with. First we unrolled the insulation and tacked it all into place on the walls. It means moving around a lot of stuff to get clear wall spaces to work in.
Then we tacked up these handy sheets of pegboard to arrange all of our gardening tools. Can you imagine somebody was throwing all of this pegboard out in the garbage? We went to a lady's house to pick up a cabinet one day, and out by the road she had stacked five huge sheets of this perfectly good pegboard to get picked up for garbage day. We asked if we could take it with us and she said "sure"! Recycling at its finest. plus keeping it out of the landfill. We filled the wall spaces with insulation and then fastened the peg board over it. We moved all of the gardening tools further back on the wall towards the rear of the garage. It is nice to have each item at arm's reach and not stacked into a corner. This area had previously been stacked with piles of siding, which is now all done and installed on the house. More room in the garage!
The purpose of this reorganization was to move all of the gardening stuff away from the front of the garage where we were always banging into it with the car doors from the Mustang and also more room on the side of our Saturn to get in and out.
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That is enough of Steve's projects, now on to some of the stuff that I've been trying to keep up with the last week or two.
This spring, I planted only SEVEN tomato plants: three Better Boys, three Early Girls, and one Julianne grape tomato. They have been producing over abundantly and we have been enjoying wonderful ripe tomatoes since mid July until now. This is a pic from early July... I watered them directly from the rainbarrel by moving the hose from plant to plant.
Now that temps are dropping and frost is coming for the season, we needed to finish picking all of the tomatoes whether they were ripe or not. When the grandkids were over they helped pick everything off of the vines.
Littlest Claire was more than happy to crawl among the plants underneath and grab every green tomato that she could find.
Chelsea helped her pile them into boxes
so we could cover them up
and let them ripen indoors.
Once all of the tomatoes were picked, I asked grandson Clayton to please yank out the vines. He sure had fun. Here's a little video clip of him pretending to be a monster and tearing them all apart.
Once they pulled all of the vines out, Chelsea helped him drag them back off into the woods. These kids are so helpful and I am so thankful that they come over and give us a hand. Sometimes projects like this go much quicker when you have help and make it fun.
Now every couple of days I have a pile of ripe tomatoes to take care of. So far I've already canned 27 quart jars of tomatoes this season, and yesterday afternoon I had enough to can another four or five jars.
The rest of the tomatoes are spread out on trays and in buckets waiting for them to ripen. I pluck out the ripest ones and do another batch of canning or making salads. I hate to think of having to buy those fake pink mushy things at the grocery store all winter. Ugh.
I leave the little grape tomatoes out on the island... as we walk by we pop one or two ripe ones into our mouth as a snack. Slowly they will all turn red.
There is nothing like the smell and taste of fresh garden tomatoes in the middle of winter. When I pop the lid off a quart jar, ready to dump it in a pot of chili, I always take the first scoop out with a spoon and eat it raw. I eat it fresh right out of the jar and it tastes like SUMMER!
When I'm ready to start canning the tomatoes, I do it in my big kitchen sink. I never had a farmhouse sink this large in any of my other homes. It's so easy to keep all the mess within the confines of the sink space. When I'm all done, I can rinse it all out and carry the peelings in a bucket out into the woods.
When I can my tomatoes, I add a tablespoon of canning salt and a tablespoon of lemon juice to each sterilized jar. Then I scald the tomatoes to loosen the skins. My Mom always called it "slurping off the skins" .... I miss my Mom this time of year. We always canned garden produce together when I was a kid. I didn't know back then how much it would mean to me now. We would stand back and look at our rows and rows of colorful jars line up on the shelves in the basement. Mom would exclaim: "OH MY, we are RICH!"
Back to my canning, as I wipe off a tear or two.
I cut out the stems, then peel off the skins, chop the tomato up into chunks and toss it in the jar. That is it. On with the sterilized lid. They go into the hot water bath for 45 minutes and they are done
If I am only doing four or five quarts of tomatoes, I use my tall soup pot and wrap each jar in cotton dinner napkins so they don't rattle against each other. If I'm using my big canning kettle, it holds nine quarts, but it is too large to use on the electric glass topped stove. If you balance a large kettle like that over two burners on the stove it can overheat the glass portion in between the two burners and crack the glass surface.
When I use that larger nine quart jar canning kettle, it needs to be outdoors on the propane burner stand. This time, I didn't have quite enough tomatoes ripened to do 9 jars outdoors, so instead I just opted to do a smaller batch inside.
Soon they are all done, and pulled out of the kettle.
PING PING PING
---and that is music to a canner's ears.
This morning at 8:30 am, the Packers are playing over in London against the Giants. The game is going to start in about 20 minutes. So I will finish up this blog and get it posted. Then I will go join Steve down in the She Shed to watch the Packers on a sunny Sunday morning.
We robbed some fresh raspberries from the kids' garden for our granola and yogurt breakfast.
The Packer game last night sure was good. We watched until half time while we were still in the house. We could see the rain start pouring down at Lambeau Field in Green Bay on the screen. It's only about 30 miles south of us. We figured this would be a good time to gather up our sleeping gear and head on out to the motorhome in the driveway.
Because of our bedroom being dismantled, we slept in the motorhome. I preferred getting out there in our jammies while things were still dry and not with the impending storms that were forecast. So we packed up the dog, some morning coffee makings and a couple donuts, and headed on out to the motorhome. We finished watching the game out there, in comfort, while the rain beat down on the motorhome roof. Packers won 35 - 17 over the Detroit Lions.
We woke up in the motorhome to sunshine, but chilly temperatures. Much better than the muggy humid stuff we had yesterday. We snuggled in with our coffee in the morning and watched a little TV before it was time to get up and start the day.
We wanted to get in the house and unroll some more of the rosin paper to make a protective walkway back and forth to the front door. That way when Paul, the plaster guy, came he could carry his buckets in and out and not worry about the hardwood floors. He has the outside water faucets, both hot and cold, to stand outside and mix up the buckets of plaster with his power mixing drill.
The original hardwood floors are so nice, we don't ever wear shoes in the house. But we sure don't expect a hired contractor to take off his shoes each time! Lol
Paul started on his project this morning and got the seams all taped up and first coat on every seam. It's important to get the first coat on and let it dry because the compound shrinks a little bit. Then before you put on the second coat, you are sure the first coat has done all of its shrinking. Otherwise you'll get cracks! Then he started filling in the rough textured walls with the new plaster. It's going to look amazing!
This is one of those wide angle shots that distorts the room, but you get the general idea. We are quite pleased that everything is filling in and it's going to be a nice ceiling surface as well as new walls ... without the splattered blown on textured surface that they were before. Look at all of that beautilful sunshine streaming in. Ahhhhhhhh
He said he should be completed sometime tomorrow.
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Silly me, remember when I was so excited my very first grape tomatoes this year? It was such a delight to go out and pick one at a time as soon as it turned red and pop it into my mouth. They started out slowly, one by one. The grandkids would go out and look all around for even ONE little tomato, to nab it from the vine and bring it in like a treasure.
Soon we were getting a handful at a time--- enough to cut up and put into a salad or even chop up and put into tacos.
Now I get tons and tons of them and they're driving me nuts LOL. Soon the season will be over. So it's time to can them up. I chopped them up into little pieces and mix them in with the large tomatoes to process in my canning jars.
Yesterday I picked a whole bunch of ripe larger tomatoes. These are Better Boys and Early Girls. My tomato patch of 8 plants is getting almost to the end of growing season. This batch is about 6 quart jars worth. I was going to can them up last night during the Packer game. But the game was so darned interesting, that I ignored the tomatoes. So this morning I washed them up and got them ready to process.
I chopped all of the little ones in my food chopper with the skins on. Then with the large tomatoes I cut out the stems and I slice an X into the bottom of each tomato. Roger, if you are reading this blog, that is your beautiful tray right there... I used it to carry the tomatoes over from the island to the counter. I love that tray!
Then I simmer the large tomatoes in a pot of water, just enough to loosen up their skins. By having the X sliced on the bottom it makes it much easier to peel the loose skin off the tomato.
I plunged the simmered tomatoes into a big tub of ice water. That helps loosen the skins up even more. I ladle them out with a large slotted spoon & peel the skins away to discard. In the bottom of the jars I have a tablespoon of lemon juice, a tablespoon of pickling salt, and a couple scoops of the chopped up little grape tomatoes.
As I peel the skin off each tomato I grab my little knife and cut it right on the large slotted spoon into sections or chunks. This is much easier than trying to hold it in your hand because the tomato is still very hot.
Instead of using my big canning kettle that holds nine jars and heating it on the outside propane burner, I am just doing six quarts in the house. I do not like putting the big canning kettle on my glass top stove, I have heard it may crack it. Instead I use my tall blue enamel soup pot, and I put in three jars at a time. Because there isn't a rack for the jars, I wrap each one in a burgundy cloth dinner napkin and I put one on the bottom of the kettle as well. That way the jars are not sitting on the hot metal. That can crack a jar. In the smaller red kettle on the right I keep the next three jars warm on a low setting just so they don't cool off too much after filling them. Once the first three jars have been in the hot water bath for 45 minutes, slowly simmering, then the next three jars will take their place.
As I type this, I have three jars finished and sitting out on the towel, and the last three jars are in the hot water bath right now. Soon I will hear the PING PING PING of their lids as they seal up tight.
I line them up on my little pantry shelves. Row by row, jar by jar, my shelves are filling up for the long winter. Nothing can be better than popping open a jar in the middle of winter to make a pot of chili or a casserole. The smell of summer comes wafting up. I reach in with a fork and take out the first chunk of tomato and eat it straight from the jar. That is my reward for these hot days of summer, processing these tomatoes.
I wistfully recall my childhood years, of canning vegetables with my mother. Year after year. I would stand by her side in that hot steamy kitchen and we would process up all of our garden produce. We did hundreds of jars of everything. Not just tomatoes! We did all kinds of canned vegetables and sauerkraut and jams and jellies. One of my fondest memories is after putting the last few jars on the shelf of what Mom called her "Veg-All Mix" which was a mix of all different leftover vegetables at the end of the season. As we placed the last few jars on the big wide deep basement shelves, she stood back with such a look of satisfaction on her face. She put her hands on her hips and smiled after wipinig her brow. She said "My oh my, are we ever rich!"
That made such an impression on me, because we weren't rich at all financially. Life was not easy with a large family and a big garden and not a lot of money. But knowing she had hundreds and hundreds of jars stashed away for the upcoming winter, it gave her the sense of being rich.
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