Baked Apple Beet Casserole

Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian friends and Happy Columbus Day weekend to my American friends and Happy Monday to everyone else!  

We just got back from a lovely weekend at the cottage with family and friends.  It was cool, but a nice mix of sun and cloud which meant we were able to both sit inside and chat and relax as well as get out for some walks. Honestly, I could get lost in the reds and golds and oranges that were all over the trees. Most of the reddest leaves had already fallen, but the oranges and reddish-oranges were still going strong along with the yellows and golds. My personal favourite are the trees and leaves with a range of colours on them from red to yellow.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt's home which is near our cottage.  It was a fantastic dinner and everything was delicious. It was such fun to get together with our good friends who joined us for the weekend as well as family.  So much to be thankful for!

 

  

I did want to share one recipe with you (and preserve it so I can find it again as it is definitely one I want to repeat). We had ham on the day after Thanksgiving dinner and I wanted to serve beets with the ham. I checked some cookbooks for recipes and modified one to make Baked Apple Beets. They are so simple to make and great when you have company as all the fuss of skinning the beets is done long beforehand.

Baked Apple Beets
Ingredients:
2 cups cooked beets, chopped
2 cups apple, peeled, cored, and chopped
1 large onion, thinly sliced 
2-3 tablespoons margarine or butter

Method:
1. Cook whole beets for 40-50 minutes and skin them when cool enough to handle.
2. Combine ingredients in a baking dish and dot with margarine
3. Cover and cook for 1 1/2 hour at 325F

Summer Painting

I did a lot of painting this summer - mostly watercolours - which is a first for me. I started doing some acrylics last year, but always found watercolours to be frustrating because you can't really fix mistakes. When we went to Newfoundland in July, my mother and I packed our little paint boxes and a pad of watercolour paper and we painted most evenings. In the process of filling up my watercolour book and creating a fun memento, I learned to love doing watercolours. 

The little paint box with a collapsible brush is so portable that I didn't mind taking it with me and it gave me a way to capture the beautiful scenes we were seeing every day. One of things I love the most about painting is how it makes you focus on details you wouldn't notice otherwise - how the shadows fall, all the colours in the rocks, the different greens and browns in the vegetation ... Every evening I would look through the photos I had taken that day and paint one or two of them. I have posted a few favourites below. 

 

 

 

Recently a friend and I went to the cottage to spend some time practicing painting sky and water because boy is it difficult. We were very fortunate to have a fantastic display of different types of clouds and water textures.  I took photos on my iPad so we could paint from the pictures and ended up with a wonderful collection in just two days. I uploaded them to the computer so the quality is not as crisp as with my camera, but that just means they have a painterly quality to them already. 

We had dark and looming clouds

and light and fluffy clouds

  
and wispy clouds

  

and a blue sky with just a few little cotton puff balls 

and even for a short period of time early on one of the mornings a pure blue sky.

The water ranged from ruffled

that was insanely sparkly at times

to soft undulations

to a smooth glassy surface which allowed for great reflections of trees and clouds

   

  

 to an absolutely smooth mirror-like surface.

I can't say my paintings were out of this world, but I learned a lot.  Namely, that clouds and water are hard to paint. Ha!

Early Spring in Cottage Country

On the weekend we went to the cottage for a few days.  While it has warmed up and the snow and ice are gone in the Toronto area, it is still pretty wintery up in cottage country.  

This has been a record cold winter for all of Canada (thanks polar vortex) and the ice is late leaving the lake this year.  It was still frozen right to the shore all around the lake and the ice was over a foot thick.  Across the lake we could even see a few people out ice fishing (I have no idea why people think ice fishing is fun, but they sure spend a lot of time doing it).

  

 

There was snow all through the bush, but it was melting rapidly and forming little streams and icy puddles.

The most exciting thing, though, was to see the crocuses blooming only feet from mounds of snow.  

The road was too soft to drive on so we walked in from the main road carrying everything we needed.  We each got a book read and had lots of time to relax.  I love weekends like that. 

How was your Easter?  Was it the busy-busy-busy-with-family type or was it the low-key relaxing type?