February 23rd, 2010
KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus
Both Amy and I have tried our hands at making home made bread over years and have had some decent results. Amy’s zucchini bread was exceptionally good this year with our home grown zucchini. Although we really enjoy home-made bread, and like the idea of knowing all the ingredients, it has been a chore to make the standard type breads (white and wheat for regular use) using our Sunbeam mixer. While the Sunbeam does the initial mixing of ingredients just fine, it just can’t handle the kneading, and its something that neither of us enjoy doing by hand.
We’ve been considering getting a nice KitchenAid mixer for about a year now. Along with the ability to knead bread doughs, we like the idea of using the attachments to process our garden vegetables. I am particularly interested in the Fruit and Vegetable Strainer to make tomato sauce with all of those beautiful Roma Tomatoes, and Amy would sure put the Slicer / Shredder attachment to good use making our salads.
We can’t afford to get the attachments right away, but we finally bit the bullet and ordered our stand mixer last week. The KitchenAid Professional 5 Plus Stand Mixer arrived yesterday just before Amy got home from work, so I had just enough time to get it unpacked, inspected, and washed before she arrived. We dove right in and started mixing like mad people 
.
Continue reading Bread Making Just Got Easier »
Posted in Cooking | 2 Comments »
November 20th, 2009
If you have sites running on CubeCart v3 it’s time to update.
It appears that CubeCart version 3.xx is no longer working with the Paypal pro gateway.
Continue reading A Heads Up If You Use CubeCart v3 »
Posted in Web Standards, Work | Comments Off
August 31st, 2009
We haven’t taken many pictures this month so I haven’t posted in a while, but here are a few images of our harvest and some new recipes we’ve tried recently.
Continue reading Harvest and Cooking »
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July 18th, 2009
Cucumber resting on the mulch
I snapped a few pictures of my raised beds this morning. The cucumbers are finally starting to look a little better. I have read that the slow growing is likely due to the amount of rain that we’ve received this spring. It’s been a very wet year so far. This being our first year gardening I’ve also been watering, and likely over-watered, my seedlings while they were still inside. It’s a learning experience
The cucumber plants are still smaller than I’d expected them to be by this time, but there are blossoms and cucumbers popping up in several places.
Continue reading Cucumbers are Coming Along »
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June 17th, 2009
This will just be a short post to give an update on our SFG for June.
Most of the plants are gaining in size, but with our late seed starting I think we are still a little behind where we should be. I think the broccoli and lettuce should have been harvest-able by this point had we gotten things started at the recommended time. Hopefully we will see heads form and grow before it gets too warm.
Continue reading June Garden Update »
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June 7th, 2009
I’d mentioned a while back that I had built an intranet application with PHP. While I was able to spit out accessible and validating pages, I was not a very advanced programmer so the entire application was written using procedural code. I was contacted by my former manager to do some reworking of the site so that it can be extended, so I have decided to use Zend Framework as a base for a complete rebuild of the project using Object Oriented programming.
I’ve been reading a bit the last few months on Object Oriented PHP development and I think that using the framework will give me a head start as there are a lot of standard things to handle in most applications that don’t need to be re-invented. Quite a bit of the security and database connectivity issues are already handled by the framework and this also gives me a place to begin to really understand the structure and theory of OO programming by following an already established structure.
Continue reading Rebuilding With Zend Framework »
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May 23rd, 2009
Mushrooms in my SFG
I have mushrooms growing in my SFG.
I’m not very sure what’s going on here. I’ve pulled up a few mushrooms over the last couple of weeks, but we seem to have gotten an explosion. I am assuming that the beds are too wet and spores have blown in somehow. Though this bed did have some leaf mold as part of the compost mix where the other two beds didn’t. I’ve seen one or two in the other beds, bu nothing like what we have going on in this one.
If anyone has advice please feel free to leave a comment.
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May 8th, 2009
I snapped a few pictures this morning of the new greenery in our SFG.
We have green things
Continue reading Square foot Garden Update »
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April 19th, 2009
All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew
While cleaning up the debris from a tree that was blown over in a windstorm last September (2008) we found that the yard was pretty torn up so we decided to start a compost pile and think about turning that area into a small garden. After a bit of research we opted to try the Square Foot Gardening(SFG) method as its not a large space and we wanted to make the most of what we had.
The largest selling point to SFG is that you can grow more, in less space, with much less work. My family had a garden when I was growing up and, though I didn’t have to do a lot of work, the bits that I remember weren’t all that much fun. I do love tomatoes fresh from the garden, and if I can get them while not weeding constantly and having to till and turn every spring so much the better.
Continue reading Starting a Square Foot Garden »
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March 1st, 2009
Whetstone Fly Fishing Outfitters has received a much needed makeover. The store has grown considerably in the last couple of years, and we needed a larger portal to have room for all the great products.
Continue reading Whetstone Makeover Launched »
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