The boys & baking pine cones

Tonight Daryl was finally up to skyping with Kyle and visiting with William. With Kyle on the East Coast and not coming home until Christmas, he was more than anxious to see Daryl and talk with him a little bit. And then William did a road trip home to say Hi and then drove half way back to college and stayed at a friends house. He also just wanted to check in and see how everyone was doing. Today was a much better day for Daryl and I’m sure that as the days goes on, he’ll just keep feeling better.  But with Daryl on the mend, I am really messing with the cows and animals in the morning. For the past year, Daryl has been feeding the cows and letting the chickens out for the day. But now, I’ve been hanging with them in the morning. At first they just stared at me but it didn’t take them long to figure out that it really doesn’t matter who they see in the morning, as long as they see someone.

So my project tonight involved pine cones. I didn’t have any nice ones in the house to work with and I almost caved and bought some in the store that were already pretty. But that probably would be kind of a sin or something because we’ve got all pine trees on our farm and tons and tons of pine cones. But the problem is that they are not open and look for lack of better words, just plain ugly! So out comes the ipad and I Google how to dry pine cones. And guess what? There was 1,560,000 different pages to look at if I wanted to on the topic of drying pine cones.  Here I was hoping to just find one!! But I guess there’s a lot of people that need to dry pine cones for some reason. Weird. OK, so what the instructions are was to line a baking sheet with tin foil and bake the pine cones for 30 minutes in a 200 degree oven. The instructions were to watch them closely so they don’t catch on fire and have excess smoke in your house. Now at this point I was wondering if I got dressed quick, I could still make it to the dollar store and pick some up. But I stuck to the original plan, got out the tin foil,  and into the oven they went.

These pine cones were pretty wet and tightly closed

I kept thinking of the ‘starting on fire’ comment,  but after 30 minutes the only thing different coming from the oven was a distinct odor of pine sap. So I reset the oven timer for another hour. By the time I got done with them, it took 3 1/2 hours to have them dry and open up. I’m not really sure what kind of pine cones other people use, but if you ever want to do this plan on having them in the oven for quite some time. I laughed when I was pulling a pan out to check them because Daryl was just coming into the kitchen and he seemed more interested than he really should have been on what I was doing. He came walking over to me, and then said in a sad voice that he thought I was taking cookies out of the oven. Wow, that was a pretty good hint wasn’t it? It kind of makes me wonder how my cookies smell when I’m baking them. Do they really smell like sap and wet pine cones?  Now that I’ve got all the pine cones baked that I needed, I guess I better switch over to cookies this weekend.

First batch of pine cones done