Camping!

This was from Labor Day, so a bit late, but better late than never. These are mostly food pictures. Next I'll probably post some people pictures.
I didn't actually take all that many pictures camping, but I got at least a few that I liked.
I haven't posted anything in a while, I guess I got a bit lazy when school started, but I hope I can average at least a couple a week now.

Pies part two

I ended up throwing the pie idea to the wayside, as we didn't have any shortening, and that was a good enough excuse to not make pie crust. I ended up making apple sauce and some apple cobblers in my cast iron pans (what a mess! I won't use them again for that). Here's some pictures.
I collected some apples first.

 Then me and my sister peeled them and I cut them into fourths and cut out the cores.

 Here they are peeled:

 I threw them into a pot with (approximately) 2 cups water, 1 cup sugar, 1 cup brown sugar, a squirt of lemon juice, and some ground cinnamon. I think it is kind of neat how the stove looks purple in the picture.

 After a while... it gets mushy. This batch took about an hour. There were still a few lumps and chunks, but they were soft. I made over a gallon I think.

Hot apple sauce with vanilla ice cream... :-)

Here's one of the cobblers

 If you have any more recipes for apples, please share! Also any tips on taking pictures of food would be appreciated.

Making apple juice!

Yesterday I made some apple juice. I didn't use one of those apple squishers, because I don't have one. Instead, I used our Mehu Liisa that we got from a garage sale for $10 I think, almost new. They are about $200 from the store. Anyways, I went and collected good looking apples from the back yard, and cut them into fourths, just to make sure there weren't ant bad spots inside.

Next, I got out the Mehu Liisa. It uses steam to juice things.

The steamer has 3 main parts. The bottom holds the water, which is boiled. The next one has a funnel that directs the steam to the fruit basket, which is the top layer. The juice then drips back into the middle through little holes in the basket. It is then poured out through the hose. Here's a link to a diagram.
http://www.juiceland.co.uk/media/images/product_detail/steamjuicer_diagram.gif

The next step was to put the apples into the basket. I added some sugar.

 Then once the water is boiling, the fruit is put on and it steams for around an hour. The steamer can also make other things, like berries, vegetables, corn. Of course, the vegetables are not in as long, and just get soft instead of juiced.

 Here is what is left after an hour of steaming:

 Here is the result: apple juice!

About 3 pints.

 The apple juice was slightly syrupy, and I think next time I'll peel the apples and make apple sauce by steaming them just long enough to get soft. The juice isn't bad, though. I want to try some sort of berries next, maybe currants or something tart.

Another experiment I want to try is making peanut butter.
Well that's all for today.

A recipe!

I have a recipe for you! I think I'm turning into quite the cook now. Here it is.

1 can of tuna
1 egg
some crackers

Crush the crackers and mix everything in a bowl, then fry it in little patties (I got two from this). The I put it between two halves of an English muffin and added some mayonnaise.
I didn't photograph the event, however.

Since this blog thing is called "Zak's Pictures" I might as well throw some in. They're unrelated to the tuna thing.

I don't invert the colors too much, so I decided to throw one in.

Handy tool

I will be leaving for 3 weeks to Finland on Friday, so I have been making a bunch of posts. I'm going to try to have them scheduled to post on their own, which should work. It will be interesting to see if it works.

Here's a few more from when I went camping.

Breakfast

Some food pictures.

Today I was doing some yard work, and was stomping down some branches into a wheelbarrow when it tipped on me. I ended up landing on my chin and hurting my wrist just a bit, so I came inside and made some more posts to publish later. I'm going to test out the scheduled publishing thingy so I can have things post while I'm gone in Finland for a few weeks. I'm leaving this Friday, and am still waiting for my memory card to come in the mail.

Here's a couple food pictures. Pineapple, pizza (made on the grill), and a cake thing. Food photography is fun, but it's also hard to get the food to look just right or to transfer what you see into a picture.