Happy First Day of September! (and link to recipe for salted maple caramel sauce)

Today, I embraced the thought of fall with open arms, ready to hug it tightly. The summer temperatures make me feel like a dizzy, exhausted, limp towel. I am longing for the cooler days of fall. The rainy weather today combined with the fact that we are officially in the month in which fall arrives made me do all sorts of fall-like activities.

First, I let the girls do their math lessons at the dining room table and lit some candles for them to enjoy while they worked with math linking cubes and colored for the lesson. I put a pot of water on the stove and poured in some ground cinnamon (because I haven’t purchased any cinnamon sticks yet for this season), a bay leaf, some whole cloves, and cardamom. It made the house smell warm and cozy.

Ellie asked for caramel apples for their morning snack. I said that I wasn’t going to make caramel apples today, but that I would make a caramel dip into which they could dip apple slices and pecans.

I did a quick Google search and found this recipe: Salted Maple Caramel Sauce Recipe. I made the sauce, put it into a bowl for the girls and sliced some apples. They were very happy.

After finishing schoolwork, I spent over four hours in the kitchen, helping Ellie bake bread and helping Emma make a pie crust for a pumpkin pie, and then I made a tomato soup from scratch. Ellie only likes my mom’s tomato soup, and it dawned on me today that it might be because I always blend whole tomatoes in my Vitamix to make soup. And my mom sieves her tomatoes. As I was tediously pressing tomato pulp through a strainer with a spoon, I was wishing that I had a Foley food mill like mom does! Apparently, my result was a success. Ellie said that she liked the soup, and Ryan said that it was great! Again, I couldn’t enjoy because tomatoes are high histamine, and are yet another healthy food that I am not supposed to eat.

Yes, I have been absent from blogging for a long time. I was sick for two weeks in August (just a bad cold—I did get tested for COVID and it was negative), and it seems that I have been playing catch up since getting better. I do have a lot of sewing and knitting projects on the go, however, that I want to share with you. And last Saturday, I took a really fun trip to Gordonsville, VA, which I will be sharing about in the near future.

I would love to hear how you are doing. I want each of my posts to be an invitation to dialogue with me. If you are subscriber, you can simply click on “reply” to drop me a line or leave a comment below.