Another fantastic weekend...

Life is good.

Very.

It's been a bit crazy the past few weeks putting in long hours trying to finish up the project I'm on at work. So it's especially nice having weekends like this one.

This weekend, my special someone was in town. Friday, she got in and we headed to Hot Doug's to get a couple of Chicago dogs and a small order of cheese fries which only Andre the Giant would have considered small. Quite tasty though. Then we headed to my office (Midway Games) so she could meet a few of my friends at work and see what it's like in a game studio. I think she was most amazed by our impressive arsenal of Nerf Guns - a grand tradition began by the talented Mr. Vanoost I believe (who incidentally began Animation Mentor this week, check his progress on his page).

Much of the remainder of the weekend involved our first attempts at canning and producing the first batch of that which would be "canned." I'm not sure why it's called canning when it pretty much always entails using mason jars, but what do I know? Perhaps "jarring" has negative connotations...Anywho, we decided to make Apple Butter. So, in order to make said appley spread, our recipe called for the best batch of apple sauce we could get our hands on.

We decided to make our own.

A trip to whole foods found us with about nine pounds of apples (Pink lady, red delicious, golden delicious, and Fuji), a bottle of the best natural apple cider we could find (though the real stuff is out of season...next time), and a jar of raw honey (which I've rather taken a fancy to in cooking). We also picked up some pint sized mason jars from Jewel Osco as neither Whole Foods nor Linens and Things had them.

Friday night we sliced and cored our nine pounds of apples (sampled a few bites), stewed em and then mashed them into a chunky pot of apple sauce. After being cinnamon'd to taste we had our seven cups of apple sauce. We threw the rest of the ingredients in a pot and called it a night.

Next morning, after some tasty pancakes and a trip to the mall for some Easter shoes, our apple butter was done. We prepped our jars and canned it up according to the directions in copy of Ball's Blue book from my home canning kit. Close to nine pounds of apples condensed to 4 pints of applebutter and some change - that "change" sitting in some tupperware in my fridge and rapidly being depleted atop leftover whole wheat muffins we made Sunday mornin.

Looks nice, don't it? :)

The rest of the weekend was hangin' out, an introductory animation "lesson" (bouncing ball of course), making labels for our jars, going to the Easter service and then brunch at some friend's place. Sunday night, we got a wild hair and ran to the store to get some cup cake mix and made some devil's food cupcakes with vanilla icing which the guys at work enjoyed the bounty of come Monday mornin.

Early Monday mornin I dropped her off at the airport and got into work extra early with enough happy thoughts to fly to Neverland and back.

If they could get me to Houston, I'd be happier:)