Have I mentioned that I own a goat? Well, I do. Ginger lives on a farm nearby, where she is cared for lovingly and where she treats the other farm animals like the underlings they clearly are.

And I’ve recently given cheese making a try. I wrote about it over at Boulevard Farm, my new Urban Homesteading blog.

Doesn’t this spider look cute? Yeah. The idea came from Family Circle. Simple idea. Make brownies in mini cupcake tins, add frosting eyes and mouth and teeth. Make legs with tootsie rolls and pretzels. Stick them in. Voila. Right?

Not quite.

What they don’t mention in Family Circle is that the little brownie guy will fall completely apart once you stick in all those legs. Really, four legs was about all the thing could handle, but I managed six on this one. It was the ONLY ONE we completed. The others, we just gave up and ate without legs. LOL.

This was fun. I had to run to JoAnn’s to buy something quick, and they had their Halloween candy kits on sale, so we bought one. Wally needed help with the details, but he was able to do large parts of this all by himself. We just basically had to melt the candy and put it in the mold, but if we wanted to color certain things different colors, we had to paint it in there. It was harder than you’d think, lol.

But it’s quite yummy, and we’ve been sharing them with friends and family, because we so clearly do not need this much candy!

So, early last week, a friend brought us some apples from a recent orchard trip. (I seem to be the only one I know who has not visited an orchard this fall.) It was so unexpected, and so kind. And the apples kind of sat there waiting for inspiration.

This morning, I decided to make apple crisp. I found a recipe for healthy apple crisp, but decided to go to rather regular unhealthy apple crisp. I reduced the amount of sugar in the recipe I found, and used whole wheat flour, and so made semi-healthy apple crisp. Oh, it’s yummy.

(recipe: apples, cut up. 1 c flour. 1 c sugar - I used about half that. 1 t baking powder. 1 egg. 1 stick melted butter - I used about half that. Toss cut up apples in baking pan. Mix remaining ingredients except butter and sprinkle over apples. Pour butter over that. bake 350 for 30 minutes.)