Day 2239 | Book Festival Starts Today

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The book festival is officially underway. If you’re local, I hope you’ve seen some of our promotional materials and are already signed up for an event or two (or all of them). If you’re not local, good news! All six of our author events are being streamed live (at no cost). I’ve been living and breathing these events and books for the last five months and I’m beyond excited to actually hear the authors speak. I might be a bit biased, but I think these are going to be thought-provoking, and entertaining, and educational. Please join us!

ALL THE BOOK FESTIVAL DETAILS

Day 2235 | Library Progress

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You know about our love for the library by now, right? And how it has temporarily moved while the building goes through a massive renovation? Yep. That’s still going on…for about another year yet. We’ve been frequenting the temporary location and are so thankful to still have access to all those books (because we didn’t have that at the beginning of Covid), but, man, do I miss walking to the library as a fun outing with the boys. I walked by it today and couldn’t help but miss spending time there. We’ll be counting down the days until reopening over here!

Day 2232 | Free Roaming

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It turns out bunnies aren’t huge fans of hardwood floors. Their adorable furry paws can’t get traction, I guess. This has worked out well for us as Flopsy gets used to our house (and the excessive volume of the youngest residents), but now that he’s acclimated, we wanted to give him more space to roam. Enter…the carpet tiles. For $3/each, we connected our rugged family room with our carpeted living/dining room. All of a sudden Flopsy’s roaming space tripled! And he’s very excited about it.

Day 2229 | Apple Strudel Muffins

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I know it’s been awhile since I’ve posted a recipe. I swear I’ve been making some really delicious meals and treats lately…I just never think about taking a photo before I dive in. Not this time. I just knew these muffins were going to be amazing. I even used some of the fresh-picked Cortland apples from our apple picking trip last weekend. What’s better than that? This recipe made 12 muffins and I still had some batter left over so I made a mini loaf out of it, too. Twelve muffins AND a mini loaf? That makes the recipe even better! Try it. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Apple Strudel Muffins

INGREDIENTS

Muffin batter:

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour

  • 1 teaspoon baking powder

  • ½ teaspoon baking soda

  • 1 teaspoon cinnamon

  • ½ teaspoon salt

  • ½ cup butter

  • 2 [heaping] tablespoons apple sauce

  • ½ cup white sugar

  • ½ cup brown sugar

  • 2 eggs

  • 1 teaspoons vanilla

  • 1 cup grated apples

  • ½ cups chopped apples

Strudel topping:

  • ⅓ cup packed brown sugar

  • 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour

  • ⅛ teaspoon ground cinnamon

  • 1 tablespoon butter

DIRECTIONS

  1. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F (190 degrees C). Grease a 12 cup muffin pan (or use liners).

  2. In a medium bowl, mix flour, cinnamon, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.

  3. In a large bowl, beat together butter, sugars, applesauce, and eggs until smooth. Mix in vanilla. Stir in apples, and gradually blend in the flour mixture. Spoon the mixture into the prepared muffin pan.

  4. In a small bowl, mix brown sugar, flour and cinnamon. Cut in butter until mixture is like coarse crumbs. Sprinkle over tops of mixture in muffin pan.

  5. Bake 20 minutes in the preheated oven, or until a toothpick inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean. Allow to sit 5 minutes before removing muffins from pan. Cool on a wire rack. *If you end up with extra batter and want to make a mini loaf in addition to the muffins, I let mine cook an extra 6 minutes.

Day 2225 | Apple Picking

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We’ve been waiting for a fall weather day so we could go apple picking (I refuse to pick apples in 80 degrees). Today was the day. It was mid-60s and perfect for a fun fall outing. We popped over to our favorite orchard and enjoyed a wagon ride, a corn maze, some outdoor games, delicious apple treats, and picked enough apples to last us the winter (or at least it feels that way). We also found this adorable rope swing. What a photo op!

I have a feeling I’ll be trying out some yummy apple recipes in my near future.

Day 2224 | Meet Flopsy

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I promised a big reveal, and here it is! We adopted a Mini Flop bunny named Flopsy. It was quite the process to win over the rescue organization, but we did it and Flopsy came home tonight. The best news? He’s litter trained and should be able to free roam around the house most of the time. Fun, right? You know I’ll keep you all posted on the adorable bunny antics happening around here.