Brown Sugar Oatmeal Apple Pancakes

I know, this is not a very good picture depicting pancakes, but it wasn’t until after I made my breakfast this morning and had covered my pancakes with syrup and eggs that I decided to write a post about these delicious pancakes.  And I might add, the word delicious is putting it mildly. 

These are always my go-to family/company pancakes.  I have yet to serve these without someone asking for the recipe.  I originally got the RECIPE, many years ago, from a Taste of Home magazine and it is now available on the internet.  To take these pancakes one step further, making them “Over-the-Top” Brown Sugar Oatmeal Apple Pancakes,  I add 1-1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon and 1 thinly sliced and diced apple (I use Gala apples).  To peel and slice my apples, I use an Apple/Peeler/Corer/Slicer.  I then slice my peeled apple stack into 8th’s.  Per approximate 1/4 cup batter, you will get 9 pancakes.  I occasionally make these on the weekends, and I always double the recipe, keeping the left-overs in the fridge.  We eat them for breakfast almost every morning during the week, until they are gone.   They re-heat really well in the microwave, making breakfast a snap on busy mornings.

BROWN SUGAR OATMEAL APPLE PANCAKES

INGREDIENTS:
1/2 cup wheat flour
1/2 cup white flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt (I use sea salt)
1-1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/3 cup packed, brown sugar
1 cup buttermilk
1 egg, beaten
2 T. vegetable oil
1/2 cup plus 2 T. quick-cooking oats
1 sliced/diced apple
DIRECTIONS:
In a large mixing bowl, combine and mix together the flours, soda, salt, cinnamon and br. sugar.  To the flour mixture, add buttermilk, egg, and oil, then mix until combined.  Stir in oats and apple slices.  Pour by 1/4 cupfuls onto a lightly greased, hot griddle.  When bubbles form on top, flip pancakes over and cook the other side until a nice, golden brown.
**You will need to watch these your first time around because they do not bubble on top as much as regular pancakes.

Muddy Driveway MESS!

Our driveway went from this, the first part of November….

To this……………


In the mornings, it’s not too bad, but as soon as the sun comes out and thaws the ground, it turns into a muddy, mucky mess.  If I need to go somewhere later in the day, I glop out to the car in my muck boots then change to my shoes once I get to the car.  I have the feeling that Spring isn’t going to be so great, this year.
When it all dries out, our plans are to scrape it smooth and have some gravel brought in.  Come on Mr. Sun…..do your thing!

Time Out For Women – 2016 – Layton Utah

I spent my Friday and Saturday at Layton, Utah, this past weekend,  at the Davis Conference Center with my sister and two daughters.  We attended “Time Out For Women”……..an event full of laughter, tears, music, cheering,  entertainment, and inspiration.  The conference center is packed full of women, and it is all GOOD.  I think the male species would even enjoy being there. 
We have attended these events for four years……….2012, 2013, (skipped 2014 – grandbaby) 2015, and 2016.  We attended 2012, and 2013 in Idaho Falls and the past two years we’ve traveled to Layton, Utah.  The entire event, including our hotel room cost each of us $99……money well worth spent.  We did, however, buy our evening meal the night before, breakfast was provided by the hotel then we purchased our lunch the following day for the cost of $10 at the conference center.  We got a sandwich or salad that included a cookie, potato chips and a drink.
Every single presenter was absolutely exceptional.  These were the presenters:

Our Friday evening and Saturday schedule:

Theme for this year:

As long as I am able and conditions allow, I will try to attend at least one of these events each year.  They are held all over the United States……2016 tour schedule:

If opportunity knocks on your door and you get the chance to attend one of these events, TAKE IT!

Grandson Pulling Faces For The Camera

I was over at my daughters home last week and I had my Kindle sitting on the kitchen table.  I turned on the camera and showed it to my 2-year-old grandson when all of a sudden, he started pulling faces at the camera.  My daughter said he had never done that before and we were rolling with laughter.  He would pull a face and then totally laugh at himself.

 

 

 

This last picture (which really wasn’t the last picture….I’ll bet there were over 40 pictures taken of him being silly, but who’s counting, right!) really cracked me up…..especially when you look at his face and then read the caption on his shirt!

And yes……………..pictures are worth a thousand words…..he really is that cute!

TOO MANY Flies

We have a real problem in our household and we do not have a clue what to do about it.  You see, it’s flies.  We always have flies in our home.  My husband said as long as he can remember, there have been flies in this home.  The home we live in was also the home my husband grew up in.
We had all new windows put in our home 3 years ago and I was hoping this would help with the fly problem but no, NOT EVEN!  We have flies all-year-round.  I’m about at my wits end with flies.  They are especially bad right when Fall/Autumn is coming on and when it starts warming up in the Spring.  When the summer months are here and the weather is hot, we don’t have too many, but we still have them.  I have a Scorpion Dirt Devil, hand-held vacuum with a flip down nozzle that I use to suck the live flies out of our windows.
 

The past few days, when the weather has been warming up and the snow is starting to melt, the flies are back in force.  As a rule, I try to sweep my floors every day.  I don’t clean our home on Sundays and just from Saturday when I swept, skipping Sunday, and now this being Monday morning, this is the pile of flies that were dead beneath our night light we keep in the hallway.  Aghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

As mentioned, every day, multiple times, I go around with my handy little hand-held vacuum, sucking flies out of our windows.  They like the sunny window areas and don’t seem to fly around the house too much.  By vacuuming them constantly, we don’t have them in the kitchen and dining areas around food.  What am I to do????????
I took a picture of this fly on our window one day before I introduced him to Mr. Scorpion Dirt Devil ………..Mwahhh, ha, ha, ha!

Horseshoe Holiday Tree

Well, it looks like my horseshoe Christmas tree………

has turned into a horseshoe Valentine tree.  I found some fun Valentine floral picks at the Family Dollar store and turned them into ornaments.  The sticks were glued into the bottom of the lips and hearts and it was a bit difficult getting them out without destroying the bottoms.  I used a pair of cutting plyers and cut the stick off but there was also big blobs of hot glue I had to get off.  It did pull off some of the glittery pink and red but I just got out some paint and touched up the bottoms, and you can hardly tell.

I’m thinking I will keep this horseshoe tree out and use it for a Holiday tree.  It will be fun trying to find ornaments for each month that will match the holiday for the month or if there isn’t a holiday in a certain month, I’ll try to find something fun to go with that month.  Like August, for instance…………hmmmm, what decorations can I use for August?!

Mount Borah

A few weeks ago when I traveled to Challis with my friend, we were driving down the main road and deer were walking right along the side of the road and were on people’s yards.  I thought the deer were pretty tame in our area but these deer didn’t seem to care that we were there.

On the way home, just as you reach the top of Willow Creek Summit and start heading down towards our end of the valley, you get the view of Mount Borah, the highest mountain in Idaho, standing at 12,662 feet.  Beautifully breathtaking…………..

And this mountain, further off to the left from Mount borah…….I do not know what it is called, but it was beautiful too, tucked behind the mountain side.

Grilled Cheese Sloppy Joes

I remembered reading a “grilled cheese sloppy joe” recipe a few weeks ago on the internet.  I thought it really sounded yummy but I could not remember where I had seen the article and I didn’t have it saved anywhere.  I decided to make them for lunch one day, deciding that it couldn’t be that difficult……
I started off by making my sloppy joe mix, using cooked hamburger and Manwich…easy enough.  Then I basically layered it just like you would a grilled cheese sandwich, adding the Manwich.  I placed one slice of bread on a paper plate and topped it with a cheese slice, Manwich, another slice of cheese and finally another piece of bread.  I buttered the top of the last piece of bread, put my little square griddle frying pan on top of the bread and holding the pan and paper plate, I flipped it over, put it on the stove and buttered the other side.

When the bottom had browned, I carefully flipped it to the other side.

After the cheese had melted and the other side was browned, it was time to eat – Yummy!

With some added Cheetos on the side, this made an easy, delicious lunch.  We did find, that it was much easier to eat with a fork than our hands, however, it made a great lunch and something we will probably do again.

Canon Camera: Change the Battery Pack – Error Fix

Over a month later, I decided to blog about something that happened on Christmas day.  On Christmas day I got my camera out to take pictures/videos.  I only got a few pics/videos before my camera showed the message: change the battery pack.  Ok, no problem…… I’ll just get another charged battery.  When I turned my camera on, I still got the same message.  I tried a third charged battery and got the same message.  That was the last of my charged batteries so I missed some shots that I really wanted.
At first I thought my charger was bad and that it hadn’t really charged the batteries so I tried another charger and got the same message.  A few days later I decided to look on YouTube to see if anyone else had had this problem.  Sure enough, there was the fix to my problem….too bad I didn’t think of YouTubing the problem before I missed some fun Christmas shots.
Anyways, here is the information I watched, tried, and yes, it worked.  My camera is now back to snap, snap, snapping photos.
My camera is a Canon PowerShot SX210IS:

Within seconds, I had it fixed and all I had to do was put my battery in the camera and place a piece of folded paper (in my case, I used a piece of thin cardboard) over the battery then shut the battery door.  Very simple fix and saved me the cost of taking it somewhere to have it fixed. – Yeah!