Must Be Fall!

Well, Brad "raked" (by raked I mean: scooped up in the pulley behind the lawn mower) the leaves, we used the fireplace, and baked a homemade pumpkin pie.  Must be fall!  In Brad's defense, even with the help of the lawn mower, he still bagged 20 bags of leaves and took them to the dump in our neighbor's van.  And that was only 1/2 the FRONT yard!  The tree still has TONS of leaves on it, too.  Alas.

And it actually isn't that cool outside yet, but I was really craving reading by the fireplace.  It didn't last long, because without a TV in there Brad wasn't willing to hang out with me in the middle of the Vikings game (he was hoping to see a loss), and it was not a lot of fun by myself.  :)  So I joined the "chilly" world of the living room where the TV is...

I got the idea to make a pumpkin pie from my sister, who just made one last night.  We both got a few small pumpkins from my mom (she grew them in her garden) last weekend.  Missy made hers using this recipe, and passed it along.  I must say, she was smart and microwaved her pumpkin for a total cooking time of 10 minutes, and she used pre-made crust.  I decided to bake my pumpkin (about 40 minutes) and make my own crust, too!  In all, it probably took about 2 hours from start to finish to get the pie in the oven (where it is now tempting me with its delicious smell!) and about 40 dishes.  Picture flour, orange pumpkin goo, and dishes everywhere.  :)

Here are some pictures of the endeavor:

The pumpkin before...

The crust...

Finished product - delicious!

Couldn't forget those seeds! (Washed & dried over night.  Melt & add 2 tbsp butter & some garlic salt.  Bake at 300 degrees about 30 minutes - yum!)

Oh!  And here's our end-of-season final picks from our garden.  We are going to do a garden again next year, but we have to rethink our crops.  We didn't end up using even half of the basil or green onions, the cucumbers never really got full grown and really took over the garden, red onions never grew, and we also didn't really eat the corn.  We did love the peppers and tomatoes, beans and peas.  So we'll see what happens next year.  Successful for our first garden, though, I'd say.