I just made myself the weirdest sandwich:

Shredded chicken breast mixed with Miracle Whip and barbecue sauce, on whole wheat bread spread with homemade cherry jam.

It was SO good.

This mixer is messing with my head.  All I want to do is cook things.  And clean my house while they cook. And organize my kitchen.  I feel like Suzy Homemaker.

(HAhahahahaha. Yeah.... no.  I am so not Suzy Homemaker.)

I am having fun with the mixer, though.

Look what came today!



Pasta gizmos!  Back to front, that's the sheet roller, thick noodle cutter, fettuccine cutter, spaghetti cutter, and angel hair cutter, with the ravioli maker on the left.

And LOOK!  There is now pasta!



I did that, my very own self! Linguini and thin spaghetti!



I cooked some of the spaghetti for dinner. It went straight from the KitchenAid into the pot of boiling water, and literally took only two minutes to cook.  Then I topped it with chopped fresh basil, olive oil, and Parmesan cheese. 

So very yummy.

Even Emma, picky eater extraordinaire, declared that it was the best pasta ever.  I feel that this is a real accomplishment on my part, since normally she only likes one very specific kind of pasta with one very specific kind of jarred tomato sauce. Broadening her palate!  Triumph!

Plus, I MADE PASTA!

Yep, it makes bread!



Easy peasy!  The second loaf from the batch went to the neighbors, because Emma and I won't eat that much bread in the next few days, and my freezer is full of fruit.

So yeah, that whole plan to wait until it wasn't 100 degrees out before turning on the oven and trying out the new mixer?



Didn't happen.  I couldn't wait.

This mixer powered through preparing chocolate chip cookie dough, which typically defeats my little handheld mixer (which is still very handy for light duty tasks, and is also a KitchenAid) that my mom got for me when I moved out on my own for grad school.

I love this stand mixer.

(I also ordered the pasta roller attachments last night, so watch for homemade noodles on Monday...)

Last night I acquired a new kitchen toy.



This was GIVEN to me by my friend Anne.

I'll say that again:

She.  GAVE.  Me.  A.  KitchenAid.  Mixer.

This was her mom's mixer, passed along to Anne many years ago, but since Anne is in mega clean-out-her-house mode and getting rid of all the things she never uses, she passed it along to me.

I've drooled over KitchenAid stand mixers for many many years, but could never bring myself to spend the money.  I can't believe I have one in my kitchen.  It's old, it's solid, and it weighs a ton.  Plus, it came with TWO bowls, a splatter shield, and the wire whip, dough hook, and flat paddle attachments!  And a cover, not shown.

Anne, you rock.

Now I want to...



...however, I may wait until it's not 98 degrees out before I turn on the oven.

Note to self:

When it's late and you're feeling a little low, don't open up Pinterest and search for "Maine."  It doesn't make you feel better to see all those pictures.

It should, but it doesn't, because Maine is there and I am here.  And "here" is "not there."

In the past three days I've tucked away a beautiful pile of fruit in my freezer: a total of 14 pounds of pitted, sliced peaches and 28 pounds of pitted sweet cherries.

Emma and I picked the cherries on Thursday at an orchard over across the valley in Cove. We waited until evening to pick so it wouldn't be so hot, and spent a peaceful hour and a half watching the sun set over the valley.  We got 34 pounds of cherries off our one tree. Pretty good, considering a late freeze damaged the fruit set! I pitted them on Friday afternoon, right before heading out for a weekend camping trip. 

I bought the peaches last Wednesday while on a work trip over in central Oregon, at the Kimberly Orchard. They have the best peaches ever. The freestone peaches aren't ripe yet, so I got a 20-pound box of almost ripe semi-clings, figuring I'd just slice them the best I could. Turns out that by Sunday night when they were fully ripe, they were so meltingly luscious that they just sliced right off the pit. And I didn't even have to scald them, the skin peeled right off!

While I wasn't particularly pleased to have to rush to process 34 pounds of cherries right before leaving for the weekend and 20 pounds of peaches immediately after getting back, I wouldn't trade that work for anything.  I love having delicious, flavorful fruit stashed in the freezer for later in the year.