Jake and I have been busy in the kitchen making pickles!  We got out a little step stool for him and he LOVES to stand on it and help when he can.  It is making cooking a lot more enjoyable for both of us.  And he is actually excited to eat the food when we finish cooking, which is a huge plus.

We tried a couple of different pickle recipes.  Jeremy is not a fan of dill pickles but really likes bread and butter pickles.  I like pretty much any kind of pickles, but we made bread and butter pickles this time.  We only had two cucumbers and I had read that you can use zucchini or squash in place of cucumbers, so we pickled two cucumbers and two zucchini.

I just made refrigerator pickles since we didn’t have enough to warrant actual canning, which I still haven’t tried.  They weren’t too hard to make,  I used the recipe from the cooking website Simply Recipes.  I’ve tried a few recipes from the site lately and I’ve got to say, so far they are great!  The zucchinis are hard to distinguish from the cucumbers unless you are really paying attention

We also tried a pickled beet recipe, which was from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman.  I honestly didn’t think I’d like it much, but we have had so many beets this year I wanted to try something different.  They are actually really good, they taste kind of like pickles, but are also sweet and spiced with cinnamon and cloves.  I really like them on salads, or just as a side or snack.

Enjoy your Friday!    We’re having grass-fed beef burgers with homemade (from a mix) gluten free bread for dinner tonight… and pickles!

When we were in the midst of moving out of our old place one thing we did was to get rid of all of our old CD cases, which were taking up a lot of space and move to a different system.  At the time, I really did not want to just throw away 3 whole trash bags full of plastic jewel cases, but doing an Internet search on where to take the old cases came up with almost nothing.  I finally did find a place in Denver that reuses old jewel cases, and for a great cause.

RAFT or Resource Area For Teaching, takes old wanted items and makes them into new teaching materials for teachers around the area.  My CD jewel cases were going to be turned into several different activity kits for teachers to use in their classrooms.  The activity kits teach all sorts of things, from how we forecast weather to geometry.

RAFT receives most of it’s unwanted materials from businesses wanting to get rid of packaging, medical supplies, old inventory, old office supplies, etc.  They were also happy to take my personal donation of three sacks of jewel cases, and in fact were out of jewel cases at the time.  I contacted them and they set up a time for me to come drop of my materials, were nice enough to show me around the facility and we even got to see how our jewel cases would be used.

RAFT accepts a variety of different items.  For more information, please see their website at http://www.raftcolorado.org/