North Dakota...Where It's At

According to this article by Yahoo! Finance, North Dakota is the best run state in the nation. Several other states in the top spots also have large agriculture sectors. It's an interesting read if you have a few minutes.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Wow, it's been over a month since I've posted anything! After harvest the guys worked fast and furious to try to apply fall fertilizer. That came to an abrupt end a couple of weeks ago when we had a storm come through.

It left us with lots of ice:

 

Almost all of the ice and a lot of the snow have since melted. Everything is brown now and in full autumn mode - almost winter.

 

Today the girls and I made an apple and a pumpkin pie to take to Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow.

 

 

I tried a new apple pie recipe and even though I have yet to taste it, it appears like it turned out pretty well so here it is, reposted from Our Best Bites:

 

Pastry for double-crust pie
6 cups peeled, sliced Granny Smith apples (about 1 1/2 pounds) (TW note: I actually used 6 Braeburn apples since they didn't have Granny Smith at the store I went to.)
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
2 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
2 Tbsp. butter, chopped
Place one pastry crust in the bottom of a 9" pie plate. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees. Combine lemon juice and apples in a large bowl.. Combine 1/2 c. sugar and next four ingredients, mixing well. Spoon over apple mixture, tossing gently. Spoon filling evenly into pastry shell and dot with chopped butter.

Top the pie with the other crust (I did a lattice crust, but you could just roll the top crust over the pie and put a couple slits in it). Bake at 450 degrees for 15 minutes. Reduce heat to 350 and bake 50 minutes more (TW note: I baked it closer to an hour). If your crust is getting too brown, you may need to put some aluminum foil over it.

 

I won't post my recipe for the pumpkin pie since I just used the one on the side of the can of pumpkin, but here is our youngest daughter's take on how to make a pumpkin pie:

 

We'd like to wish you the happiest of Thanksgivings from our farm to you. We hope you will be enjoying an abundance of health, happiness, family and food tomorrow. We give thanks, of course, for all of the farmers who have made our Thanksgiving meal tomorrow possible, for the employees we get to work with every day, and for the gift of family as we gather together.

 

As Marcie from Charlie Brown Thanksgiving put it, “Thanksgiving is more than eating, Chuck…we should just be thankful for being together."